


Beyond the Breaking

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [10]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (You should probably read the author's note for that one), (ish?), Action/Adventure, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Autistic Pidge | Katie Holt, Dualityverse Fic, F/F, Full series AU, Galra Keith (Voltron), Grief/Mourning, Hunk (Voltron) Has Anxiety, Hurt/Comfort, Lance (Voltron) Has ADHD, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Mind Control, Minor Character Death, Multi, Other, aftermath of Major Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2020-02-18 14:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 39
Words: 480,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18701059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: The paladins of Voltron are on the edge. They've lost one of their own. They've seen their family turned into weapons of the Empire. They each have their own demons to battle. As Zarkon and Haggar press their advantage, the paladins will need to rely on each other more than ever. The challenges they face are more daunting than ever, but Voltron must rise to meet them. They have no choice. The fate of the universe rests on their shoulders.The final battle is here.[The Final Season of Voltron Duality.][Updates Mondays]





	1. Event Horizons

**Author's Note:**

> So here we are. The final season. Can you believe it? Because I'm kind of speechless. Thank you all SO much for the love and support you've given this series. I'm so thrilled to finally be able to share this with you.
> 
> Before we start, if you haven't seen either on Discord or on Tumblr, there are now chapter summaries for the entire Duality series available as Google Docs [here](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FQdl-hixTMnwsMlemOx9OodY1maFGsMt) and official art of Meri, Val, and Akira [on my blog](https://squirenonny.tumblr.com/tagged/duality-art).
> 
> You can find an overview of trigger warnings that apply to the fic as a whole [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rQ2n_F4RMjvb3y69NhqM52S7tBIZl3kwN6yw20TpxCA/edit?usp=sharing) (beware of mild spoilers at the link, though you'll know where to stop reading if you don't want specifics.)
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Grief and mourning. Picks up immediately after the end of _Shadows of Stars_ , so all scenes involving Pidge are pretty heavy with the fallout of Ryner's death. Referenced emotional abuse in Keith's POV scene.

New Altea’s sky was scarred.

On the ground, evidence of the battle was everywhere--rubble in the streets, craters where buildings should have been. But Allura's eyes were on the night sky, and on the wounds painted there for all to see. The stars stood out in stark relief to the deep black; with most of New Alafor powerless, she could even see a dusting of fainter lights in a band across the sky--the corpses of a hundred robeasts suspended above the planet by one of the few remaining defensive systems. The planetary rings glowed silver and bronze with the light of a sun that was still hours away from rising, but the one that should have bisected the sky over New Alafor instead ended in jagged spires halfway up from the horizon. An entire segment of this ring had been dislodged by the robeasts’ assault, ripped right off the defensive ring like a branch snared in a windstorm.

Allura still hadn’t heard the final count of how many had died when the debris came crashing down.

There were a lot of things that still needed to be done, and Allura ought to be inside helping. Instead, she’d come out here, to the street outside the military bunker’s access point, where the chill wind gave her a reason to be breathless that wasn’t the fear gnawing at her insides.

She should have expected Lance to follow her.

"She's fine, you know.” He stepped closer, his arm brushing up against Allura's and providing a bit of relief from the wind. "You heard Val; she made sure no one touched her on her way out."

"I know that." Allura winced hearing her own tone--cold and snappish--and she leaned against Lance to soften her words. It was just that her heart was beating faster than a Tyrillian songbird's, and she felt as though she hadn't drawn a full breath since Karen had broken the news of Ryner's death. "I _know_ you’re right. But I don't think I'll be able to relax until I see her for myself."

"Yeah." Lance hesitated, then pulled Allura into a hug. "I feel you there."

His voice shook, and Allura cursed herself for forgetting.

It had been two hours since Val returned with word that Meri had escaped the _Eryth_ and was on her way to New Altea--more than enough time for a fast ship to get here, but no one knew enough about the ship Meri had taken to know whether or not it could be called _fast._ It might take hours, yet, for Meri to arrive--and that not accounting for any detours she might have taken to throw the Empire off her trail. But Allura felt as though she _should_ have been here by now, and the anticipation had driven all other thoughts from her mind.

Even thoughts of the Castle of Lions, apparently, and of those who had been trapped within when Keturah's AI seized control and fled to the other side of a wormhole.

Lance's brother and sister were among those who had been taken.

So was Coran.

"I'm sorry," Allura whispered, extracting her arms from between them and returning Lance's embrace as a new fear joined the one already pounding against her rib cage. "Is there any update? I should be helping to--"

"Don't apologize," Lance said. "We've got everybody we can looking for the castle already, and there's nothing any of us can do to speed it up. Until Haggar shows her face or slips up, we've got no leads. Shiro's getting updates from people right now, I think, but if they'd found anything, they would have called _us._ All we can do right now is wait."

She sighed, letting her head drop onto his shoulder. "I hate waiting."

There was no humor to Lance's laugh, but there was sympathy, and it loosened some of the ice that had closed in around Allura's heart. Lance had hardly left her side since the castle disappeared. She might have thought he was avoiding his family for some reason--afraid he would break down if he let himself notice how terrified they all were for Luz and Mateo--except for two things. One, she'd never known Lance to avoid his family for any reason.

Two, she'd seen the look he'd shared with Val and Nyma as Val quietly added herself to the group that had gone after Pidge. There had been no discussion of it. Matt and Karen were going because no one could expect them to think of anything else until they had Pidge back safe; Akira was going because they had no leads and Akira's instincts might give them an edge in their hunt.

And Val was going because she'd simply left no room for argument.

Something must have happened when Blue pulled her paladins away to help Meri. Something more than a fight against Haggar-- _Keturah._ Something more than that discovery, which still hadn't completely sunk in.

The team hadn't had time to talk about all that had happened, though, and they weren't likely to until they'd dealt with the current crises. The Red Lion had left to search for Pidge as soon as all four of her passengers were on board, unwilling to risk the smallest delay. The entire rest of the team would have gone along in a heartbeat, of course, except that they might receive word of the castle-ship at any moment, and they would need the bulk of their strength present to retake it.

For now, everyone was trying their best to steal a few hours of sleep before they left again. Everyone except Lance, Allura, and Shiro, it seemed.

The door opened, and Allura turned, her heart once more in her throat. Every sound was doing that tonight--every footfall a promise of a threat, every voice a whisper of a new tragedy. She broke away from Lance and spun, falling into a ready stance without thought, only to freeze when she saw Shiro there. He looked as weary as she felt, his hair stiff with dried sweat and stirring feebly in the night wind. Nyma was close behind him.

"There's a ship inbound," Shiro said. "I wasn't sure you'd heard; the comms have been acting up again."

Allura stopped breathing. "Meri?"

Shiro hesitated. "I can't say for sure..."

"It's her," Lance said, locking eyes with Nyma, who nodded.

"Blue's about two seconds from blasting a hole in the hangar to go meet her."

Allura had started for the door as soon as Lance confirmed it was Meri, but she stopped now, turning back in alarm. "Blue won’t _actually_ \--"

"She's chill," Lance said, holding up his hands. "For now. Meri must have felt her, too. She's headed straight for her."

Allura nodded, taking off once more. All the lions had been moved to Hangar A, the largest of the central bunker's hangars, if not the most conveniently located. Like most of the bunker, the hangar was located a hundred feet beneath the remains of New Alafor, and Allura had to wind through what felt like five miles of labyrinthine corridors to reach it.

A small Galra shuttle was lowering through the roof when she arrived, its nose drooping toward the ground. It corrected itself and set down, rattling a little as the Blue Lion dropped into a crouch beside it. Behind Blue, Yellow had also begun to stir, her eyes following the shuttle's progress.

The crew of mechanics assigned to the two lions shied back, whispers passing between them. Most of them had seen the lions in action today, but there was a difference between seeing a manned ship perform amazing feats and seeing that same ship move on its own to greet a new arrival.

Allura opened her mouth to calm them, but the shuttle's ramp opened at that moment, and it stole the breath from Allura's lungs.

Meri had lost weight, and a lot of it. She looked wasted, her cheeks hollow and her skin pallid, her hair longer and limp around her face, her eyes rimmed in red. Blue's purr echoed throughout the hangar, a frantic edge to the sound, and Meri slowly turned toward her. The look on her face was one of a broken woman clinging to an edge. She didn't cry, but she seemed about to, and she reached up a hand to trail her fingers along Blue's nose.

The gesture broke the spell that had held Allura frozen at the hangar entrance, and she sprinted to Meri's shuttle, her own vision blurring. " _Meri!_ "

Meri turned, and her crumpled expression finally shattered. She tripped down the ramp, and Allura caught her at the bottom, crushing her in an embrace. She eased up at Meri's first, pained breath, keenly aware just how frail Meri was. She felt like a wisp of herself, insubstantial even now that Allura had her back.

"Lura?" Meri breathed, her voice wavering. "Is that really you?"

"It is," Lance said, appearing suddenly at Allura's side and putting a hand on Meri's shoulder. He looked at Allura, his smile sad. "You're home, Meri. This isn't an illusion. I know you can feel it."

She lifted her head and searched his face, and while they were busy studying each other Shiro touched Allura's elbow. She turned.

"She needs rest," Shiro murmured. "Why don't you take her somewhere quiet? I'll come get you as soon as there's news."

Allura almost argued. She knew Shiro was trying to get _her_ to rest as much as Meri--Allura wouldn't deny that she needed it, either. But there was so much to do...

But Meri was still clinging to her with one hand even as she flung the other around Lance's neck and quietly cried into his shoulder, and Allura didn't think she could have left Meri now for anything short of the apocalypse. Maybe not even that. She met Shiro's eyes and nodded. "The _second_ you hear anything," she said sternly.

"I promise. Go on. You both need this."

Allura wouldn't argue with that. They retreated back into the depths of the bunker, to the residential block that had been set aside for the paladins and their families. Several door locks glowed softly red, soft voices emanating from behind others. Allura and Meri walked together to an open door and the dark, empty room beyond. Meri kept a tight hold on Allura the entire way, her eyes fixed on the floor. She didn't speak, and Allura didn't try to force her. She still wore the robes of a druid, and Allura found some pajamas in the room's small closet--thin and plain, but self-sizing in the Altean tradition. She handed one pair to Meri before stripping off her paladin armor and changing into her own. The sweat and grime that had clung to her since the battle's end made itself known once more, and Allura grimaced. A shower wouldn't be a bad idea, as long as she was taking some time to recover.

But when she turned around, Meri hadn't moved from her place at the foot of the bed. The pajamas still sat on her lap, and she stared at them with tears slowly dripping from her chin.

Allura sat beside her, cupping Meri's cheek in one hand. "What's wrong?"

Meri shook her head, swiping at the tears with the heel of her hand. "Nothing. Sorry." Allura caught her hand as it fell and squeezed, trying to impart a measure of comfort.

"Can I help?"

Meri screwed her eyes shut, but she let Allura peel off her robes and the plain black outfit she wore underneath. The rips and scorch marks were hard enough to look at without seeing the cuts, burns, and bruises on the skin underneath, but Allura kept her lips pressed together. Meri hadn't given any sign that she needed a stay in a cryopod--and perhaps more convincingly, neither of her fellow blue paladins had said anything either.

More than anything, Meri looked like she needed sleep. She hadn't asked why Coran hadn't been there to greet her, though that may have been a blessing. Once Meri had rested, once she was acting a little more herself--then Allura would tell her. If she said anything now, Meri would only try to push herself too far.

Once Meri was changed, she followed Allura to the bed. Allura lay down first, building up the pillows behind her back. Meri found space between Allura's legs, her head pillowed on Allura's shoulder, and Allura pulled the blanket up to cover them both before settling her hands around Meri's waist.

"Sleep," Allura whispered. "You're safe now."

Meri needed no further prompting than that. She melted against Allura, her tears soaking into Allura's shirt for a few minutes before her clenched breathing softened.

Allura watched her sleep, heart in her throat. She was afraid to close her eyes, as though Meri might vanish in the night. It had been so long since they'd been together--since they'd even _talked._ There were others who still needed her. Coran, the children, the others who had stayed on the castle-ship. In a few short hours, with any luck, they would be off for another battle. Allura should take this chance and rest up.

She wouldn't, though. She knew that.

So she lay there, enraptured by Meri's too-light weight on her chest, and watched the minutes tick by on the clock beside the bed.

* * *

"Anything?" Karen asked, looking from Matt to Akira and back again.

Akira winced and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Karen. I just don't know."

Matt's hand tightened on Red's controls. He didn't say anything, just turned them around and took off at top speed for the next-closest asteroid. Akira wanted to soothe him, but even if he'd known how, he doubted it would have been welcome right now. With no better leads to go on, they'd come to Jessaranti--the last place they knew for sure Pidge and Ryner had gone. Granted, that had been something like twenty-four hours ago, maybe longer now. Akira didn't know all the details, but he gathered Karen and the others had lost contact with them sometime before getting the call to New Altea.

It was a starting point, at least, and Red certainly wasn't giving Akira anything better to go on. He'd gotten used to listening to her barely-there voice at the fringes of his mind. Ever since his impromptu arrival on the homeworld, it seemed she'd been his constant companion--never much of a conversationalist, but always there to give him a nudge in the right direction.

The last few hours, though--more than a few--nothing. She'd withdrawn from his mind towards the end of the battle on New Altea, and he hadn't felt a thing from her since. He'd hoped the search for Pidge might motivate her to reach out again, but nothing had changed.

Matt wasn't having much more luck searching the old fashioned way. He flew them all over the asteroid belt, all four of them watching out the three-sixty viewscreen for signs of the Green Lion--or of whatever wreckage she might have left in the wake of her battle with Haggar's latest monstrosity. So far, they'd turned up a whole bunch of nothing.

Val fidgeted on her perch on the arm of Akira's chair. He'd taken Keith's usual spot--less because he felt welcome there than because it gave a better view than sitting against one of the walls. Val sat beside him, and Karen paced somewhere beyond that, her tension filling the air like an invisible web.

"They found _something_ here," she muttered. "They must have."

Val laid a hand on Akira's arm as he started to say something, and he sighed. Why was he even _here_ , if Red wasn't going to give him any hints? Keith should have come in his place. At least that way Matt would have someone to keep him from getting so lost inside his own head.

Then again, leaving Keith behind had been its own kind of mercy. Spared him the shared emotional storm _and_ made it so he didn't have to feel guilty about abandoning Lance. Akira had seen his indecision when Matt and Karen had announced they were leaving. Matt must have seen it, too. Matt's sibling was missing, but so were Lance's. Keith couldn't be in two places at once, so Matt had told him to stay. _Mom says Pidge isn't in danger anymore. The others are going to need you more._

Keith hadn't seemed convinced, and truth be told, Akira wasn't sure about leaving him behind--not with the way he'd wilted at seeing his mother at the other end of a room. Then Nyma, of all people, had sidled up to Akira, punched his shoulder, and promised to keep an eye on Keith while Akira was gone.

Hell, maybe _Nyma_ would have been the better choice for this mission. She couldn't have been any worse at it than Akira.

"Wait," Karen said, suddenly appearing beside Akira. "What's that?"

There was a beat of silence, then Matt wheeled Red around, and Akira lost sight of the speck on the distant asteroid that Karen had pointed out. Karen rushed to Matt's side, and Val chased after them. Akira almost followed, but Matt took off before he could stand, and Akira dropped heavily back into his seat as Val cursed and stumbled back.

Akira caught her, and they both joined Matt and Karen once Red's momentum slowed. The asteroid itself looked identical to every other they'd passed, but there was a structure here--a nondescript base with five outlying domes, one of which looked like an egg that had been stepped on.

"They were here," Matt said. "Not long ago."

Akira glanced to the screen he'd pulled up, which showed faint Quintessence readings inside the dome. There was nothing here now that could have produced them, and the vacuum would have dispersed the traces relatively quickly. Akira couldn't put a timeline on whatever battle had happened here, but he had a sinking feeling this was where Ryner had died.

"Okay," Karen said, drawing in a trembling breath. "So where are they now?"

Matt opened his mouth, but he had no answer to give. He looked to Akira, helpless, but all Akira could do was shake his head.

"I mean... Let's think about it," Val said. "If this is where Ryner..." She hesitated, then forged ahead. "They would have gone for help. They obviously didn't come to the castle, so where else would they think to go? Olkarion?"

Akira waited for a flash of inspiration--a sudden epiphany that Val was right, or the kind of visceral rejection that meant she was on the wrong track. Even if Red wasn't giving him direction, she might at least react to someone else's... But she didn't, and Matt was still looking at Akira like he had all the answers in the world.

He must have seen something in Keith's head during the last battle, if he was so ready to trust Akira's say-so.

Akira shrugged. "Makes sense to me," he said.

Matt nodded, though his motions were sluggish as he input the coordinates for Olkarion. Red opened a wormhole for them, and they plunged in.

Akira only prayed Val's instincts were better than his own.

* * *

They'd set aside an entire clearing for Ryner, there at the center of the legacy grove, atop a small hill with a gap in the canopy to allow the soon-to-be-sapling all the sunlight it could possibly need. It was a place of honor, and Ryner deserved every bit of it. Pidge knew that much for certain.

It was getting easier to extract their own mind from the echoes of Ryner's as the day wore on. They remembered Ryner as she'd been when they first met--Ryner and her rebel nation forging a home for themselves in the depths of Vivasi. Pidge had never appreciated just how much of a sacrifice it had been for her to leave all this and join the paladins.

They felt an echo of that sacrifice now, though they fought against it. The evening had passed in a haze as they wallowed in the fragmented remains of the bond, sinking into the places where Ryner's thoughts and memories had tangled with their own. Each one was like a black hole, pulling at them, threatening to draw them in and crush them, and each time they crossed an event horizon, it was hours before they remembered who and where they were.

But it wasn't just the holes that remained as wounds of Ryner's death. Something of Pidge had died, too. They hadn’t yet figured out how much.

Now the sun was setting, but Pidge had found a bit of solid ground, and they were fighting not to lose their footing. They needed to stay clear-headed if they were going to begin to make amends. Aransha had asked Pidge to help with the planting. She'd been Ryner's second-in-command in this cell and had taken over when Ryner left with Pidge. In some ways, that made her and Pidge very much alike.

Didn't make it any easier to kneel beside her in the soft dirt over a fresh grave. Aransha dropped the seed into a hole positioned somewhere over Ryner's body, covered it over with the dirt, laid her hands atop it and waited for Pidge.

_I'm not ready for this._

It seemed to have all happened in a rush. The fight with their dad, Ryner falling, dying. Arriving on Olkarion. And now burying Ryner. Saying goodbye.

They weren't ready to move on.

But Olkari traditions called for quick, private burials. They didn't embalm their dead, or bury them in caskets; the dead provided nutrients for their legacy trees, became one with their legacies in a very real sense. The burial wasn't the memorial, either, the way it was with the funerals Pidge had attended on Earth. Only the immediate family attended burials--Pidge and Aransha, in Ryner's case. Other mourners would come in their own time over the next few days and impart their Quintessence to the legacy sapling.

It had been just a few hours since Ryner's death, but Pidge saw the shape of Ryner's traditions in the impressions her mind had left on theirs. After the hand they'd had in her death, the least they could do was give her the burial she would have wanted.

So they leaned forward, laying their hands on the soil beside Aransha's. It brought to mind the day Pidge had first joined Ryner in her garden in Green's hangar. An invasion of weeds, Pidge had called it, wrinkling their nose. Ryner had only smiled and waited for Pidge to soften enough to give gardening a try. And despite all Pidge's protests, despite how often they'd called it an eyesore and a waste of space... it was one of the very few things in the castle that had been well and truly _Ryner's._

There was no one to take care of that garden now. Only Pidge--and whatever the opposite of a green thumb was, Pidge had it.

"Gently, now," Aransha said. "The seed will do most of the work for you."

Her hands began to glow with the soft light of Quintessence, and Pidge began to follow, their mind tumbling down familiar cascades--and into an absence so profound it drove all other thought from their mind.

They snatched their hands back from the soil, tears escaping their eyes with every rapid-fire blink. They scrambled back from the edge of Ryner's shadow, straining to keep hold of themself. They were Pidge Holt, green paladin of Voltron. They had to remember that. And they _knew_ how to accelerate the growth of plants--of Olkari plants most of all. Ryner might have taught them, but they had learned in their own right. They _knew_ how to do this, and they had an amplifier circlet on their head to foster their attempts. This should have been easy.

They just had to be careful not to turn down the wrong memory's path and wind up in a mind that was no longer there to catch them.

Aransha was, mercifully, right about Ryner's seed doing most of the work. All they really had to do was start the process of sprouting, then lend it their Quintessence. It grew more quickly than seemed possible, like a time-lapse video of a plant maturing. From a tiny yellowish nub poking through the soil to a frail seedling sprouting its first few leaves to a sapling that rocketed up to three and a half feet in a matter of moments--

Pidge was left kneeling beside a sapling that should have been a year or two old. Its trunk was slender and flexible, but it had a healthy halo of leaves--deep, emerald green leaves, almost unnaturally vibrant. The bark was a soft, shimmering silver, and Pidge had to touch it to convince themself it wasn't actually made of metal.

Aransha sat back on her heels, breathing out a long breath. So that was it, then. Ryner was dead--well and truly, now. Buried, with a legacy sprouting from her grave... There was no convincing themself that it was all a mistake, not now.

Ryner was dead, and that meant Pidge was on their own, half a shared mind ripped out and rotting, and the rest threatening to go the same way.

They should get back to the team. That was what Ryner had wanted, and while Pidge hadn't listened in time to save her, that was no reason not to listen to her now. They should go back, tell everyone what happened, get some help...

And then what? Drag the rest of their family, all their friends, all their allies, into this same fight? What if it was Matt who got shot next time, or Shiro, or Keith? Who would be the next person who died in Pidge's place? Images flashed behind their eyes--images of Ryner, and of their dad, vivid memories of the hole in Ryner's gut and the desperate sound of her dying breaths. (Of the darkness creeping in, pain fading, the terrifying, incomprehensible infinity that came next.)

Only in these visions, it was Matt who was dying. It was Lance, Allura, Akira, their mother. Why was _that_ so clear? They could hardly hold onto their name from one step to the next, but the moment of Ryner's death was captured in perfect clarity to be replayed on endless loop, variations on a macabre theme?

Maybe she’d been right to try to kill Pidge's dad. Maybe there was nothing of him left to save. Maybe Pidge was only going to get more people killed if they kept clinging to their baseless hope.

They stumbled through the forest, tripping over roots as the twilight lengthened to full dark and the voices of the Olkari faded to whispers at the edge of Pidge's hearing. They felt as though they were being watched, judged, and they quickened their pace as a vice closed in around their heart.

_No._

They refused to believe their dad was beyond saving. Even if he'd killed Ryner--even if they couldn't see him in the cold, sadistic smile that had chased them through the dark of the Jessaranti base--he _had_ to be in there, somewhere. Shiro and Allura hadn't been destroyed when Haggar took control.

So then... what? What did they do? Choose their dad, and risk getting someone else killed? Or end him, even if it meant that Ryner had died for nothing?

Their vision swam, and they fell against a tree, the panic constricting their throat. They weren't breathing right--hadn't been for several minutes, probably. It was hard to tell. It was hard to tell anything.

They didn't want this to be real.

Their body wanted nothing more than to slide down into the deep shadows between the trees, to let their mind cross the event horizon and fade until this all stopped feeling so pressingly _real._

Instead, they stumbled on, tripping over tree roots and following threads of thought that led them nowhere, until they came to a stop in front of the Green Lion. Even from the outside, pain radiated inside their skull, a dull throbbing headache that made thought difficult.

That was okay. They didn't want to think right now.

They needed to get their dad back. That was all that mattered.

* * *

The last time Matt had seen Inanimasi, the sprawling Olkari City, it had been fresh from a war. Demolished buildings, blood and ruined sentries in the streets. It hadn't seen anything like the level of destruction he'd just witnessed on New Altea, thank every god, but the scars had been there for all to see.

By now, those scars had healed over. Every so often, Matt could pick out a building or monument for the new addition it was, but most of them blended seamlessly with the rest of the city. It was supremely mundane, by the standards of this war: high tech and sprawling in a way that still boggled the mind, but _peaceful._ There were young adults--clearly drunk, or high, or whatever altered state the Olkari considered fun--stumbling out of night clubs, their laughter and conversation booming across the streets; a concert stage in the park with all the detritus to testify to the show that must have ended recently.

Matt wasn't sure of the time, but it was late, and every inch of him shriveled away from their companions on the street. The uncertainty was eating at him. It made sense for Pidge to have come here, but they had no evidence that they had, and no clue where in the city they might be now if they _were_ here at all. They'd come to the capitol district, but even here there were half a dozen hospitals where Pidge might have taken Ryner.

Akira had stayed behind with Red, hoping that a little bit of meditation might help him get in sync with Red.

She was shutting them out.

Matt had thought, at first, that it was his own panic clouding the bond, drowning out Red's voice in a torrent of fear and worst-case scenarios. But if Akira was having the same troubles...

Hell, Matt couldn't blame her for shutting them out, as frustrating as it was that it was happening _now._ Red's last paladin had betrayed the team. Had tried to kill Meri. Had taken the castle-ship, with Coran and his crew and several dozen civilians--including children--still on board. Whatever old wounds Keturah's betrayal had left, tonight had ripped them all wide open.

It was fucked up was what it was.

But Pidge was missing, too, alone and maybe hurt, and Matt just wasn't sure he was up for comfort right now when the panic rode so close to the surface. He hoped Akira had more luck; it would probably do them all good.

In the mean time, Matt was here, wandering Inanimasi in the middle of the night with his mother and Val, all of them gawking like a bunch of tourists who'd gotten lost in the middle of sight-seeing. Matt had no clue where they were going, but his feet wouldn't let him slow down; he charged ahead, and would have left the others behind if they hadn't picked up the pace to match him.

"We're close to the university," Karen said suddenly, her voice shattering the fragile silence.

Val turned. "You think they went there?"

Karen hesitated. "I have no idea. But Ryner had friends there. Colleagues. One of them might have heard the news."

And even if they hadn't, they might have a better idea how to get information than a handful of offworlders. _If_ there was anyone there at this hour. Why did it have to be nighttime here _now?_

They pressed on, for lack of any better options, and threaded their way through the darkened campus. There were still lights on in some of the residence halls, but most of the other buildings were dark, their doors locked. Karen squinted at every sign they passed, switching on her phone's flashlight to illuminate the writing so Pidge's translation software could do its job. The building's weren't named after the specialties or departments they housed, just after random people who'd probably given money to the university or alumni who'd gone on to make a name for themselves, so the signs were less than useless to Matt, but Karen kept clicking her tongue and muttering under her breath until at last they arrived at somewhere called Tchilussa Center.

The door was locked, and Karen cursed as she pounded a fist on the smooth metal. After a moment, she backed up, scanning the side of the building. Matt spotted a row of illuminated windows near the end of the building at the same time she did, and he traded an alarmed look with Val as Karen stalked toward the lights. They were on the third floor--too high to see whoever was inside, but that wasn't about to stop Karen. She searched the ground until she found a pebble, then flung it at the windows.

The first throw fell far short, but she stooped and gathered more pebbles and tried again, and again, until she finally hit her mark. No one immediately appeared at the window to investigate, so she kept throwing rocks until Val put a cautious hand on her shoulder.

"Uh... Mrs. H?"

Karen shook her off and threw another rock.

"Are you sure this is the best way to go about this?"

"Unless you have a phone number for somebody in that room, I don't see a better option," Karen said. Matt was inclined to agree with her, and when Val glanced his way, he just shrugged and started hunting for pebbles to pass on to his mother. Val sighed, holding up her hands in surrender.

It took a few minutes, but eventually someone came to the window to investigate. Already wide eyes widened--the paladin armor was a dead giveaway, regardless of whether or not the man recognized any of the visitors in particular. The Olkari waved a hand, then pointed back toward the main door, and Karen gave a triumphant smile as she led the way back.

The Olkari met them there a few moments later, opening the door and gesturing them inside. "Paladins," he said, breathing hard. "My apologies. I didn't know you were en route."

"Neither did we until a little while ago, to be fair," Val said. "Sorry to bother you so late."

He fluttered his hand, turning on his heel and leading the way back toward whatever lab or office he'd been working in. "There's no need to apologize. We recognize the urgency of the situation, and I assure you we're all working as hard as we can."

Karen's steps slowed. "You... are?"

"Of course. We don't have any results just yet, I'm afraid, but you're welcome to help us. Tracing the path of a wormhole remotely is no mean feat, and it involves a lot of number crunching. I don't know if any of you have training in the field, but--"

"Sorry." Karen held up a hand. " _Wormholes?_ I don't..."

But it had just clicked for Matt. "You're trying to track the castle-ship."

The man blinked. "Of course we are. We got a team together as soon as Paladin Shiro got in touch. We're getting more help as people wake up and see the memo we sent out. I'm sure it won't be much longer."

"No, that's-- That's fine," Karen said. "Thank you. We're not here for that."

It was the Olkari man's turn to falter, his antennae twitching as he studied her. "You're not?"

She shook her head. "My youngest is the green paladin. Pidge. They were with Ryner sometime yesterday when..." She paused, drawing a deep breath. "Ryner's dead. We were hoping Pidge might have come here."

The man looked stunned. They stood just outside an elevator, and he'd had his hand poised to press the call button. He was frozen now, though, staring at Karen and not even blinking. "Ryner's dead?"

Karen pressed her lips together and nodded. "I'm sorry to be the one to break the news. Obviously you haven't heard from Pidge, but if there's anyone you could call--any way you know that we cold find out if they brought Ryner to a hospital in the city, or if anyone might have seen the Green Lion arrive--"

The man shook himself. "Of course." He pressed the call button. "Let's go upstairs. I'll get you some tea, and you can rest while I make some calls. If they're here, we'll find them."

* * *

Akira knelt on the floor of Red's cockpit, his hands curled around his knees, his eyes closed, and every inch of his mind turned toward the lion around him. His shoulders kept creeping toward his ears, and he tried to relax. He wasn't going to force anything where Red was concerned.

"I know you're there," he said, his voice scratchy from fatigue and frustration. The early wakeup call on the Galra homeworld felt like ages ago; there had been three worlds, an asteroid belt, and somewhere around twenty-four hours between then and now, and however much Akira tried to push through, he could feel it all crashing down on him.

He couldn't collapse yet, though. Not until they found Pidge.

The air around him hung still and silent, not a whisper or the groan of shifting metal there to tell him that Red was listening, but Akira knew she was. How could she not be?

"Is this about Keturah?" he ventured. "Because... Shit, Red, I _get it._ What she did was fucked up, and I don't blame you for needing space. Any other day, I'd give it to you. But this is _Pidge._ We can't get through on the comms, Karen isn't getting anything from Green... If they don't find them out there, then we've got nothing. Can't you just...?"

He spread his arms, helpless. Truth be told, he felt like an asshole for demanding help from Red, considering the mess with Keturah. He wasn't lying when he said he got it, but Red might be the only one who could help find Pidge. Couldn't she give him something? Couldn't she at least talk to him, or to Matt, or to whoever?

She'd had no problem getting inside his head a few hours ago, when she'd used him to tear apart a Lion-esque robeast, like a miniature prototype of Dark Green. "Did I do something wrong?" he asked, lifting his head and looking around the cockpit. "If I did, I'm sorry. I'll make it right if I can, just, _please_. Pidge is out there all alone. We have to find them."

Nothing.

Akira remained where he was for a few minutes longer, straining to catch Red's voice in the buzzing silence around him, to feel her nudging him in a direction--any direction. But she'd shut him out so completely it was like he'd never been her adjunct at all. He had no awareness of the mind housed within the Lion's frame, and even less awareness of Matt, wherever he was out there in the city.

They'd set down on one of the airfields--massive structures levitating several hundred feet above the city skyline. Olkarion was seeing more transgalactic traffic than ever before, and with real estate already at a crunch, the only place to house visiting ships was high in the air, on platforms that drifted in set patterns to avoid permanently blocking out the sun in any given neighborhood. Shuttles ran to the ground at all hours, but from up here, Akira had a spectacular view: the city spread out below, street lights, signs, and windows lighting up the night; the jagged cut of the mountains to east with the first hint of sunrise touching the forest beyond.

The forest.

The jolt of realization was so jarring that for a moment Akira thought Red had decided to reopen their bond, after all. But it didn't have the same urgency as Red's instincts, or the same certainty. As soon as he thought it, he began to doubt himself.

The comms panel lit up with a call at that moment, and Akira reached out to accept it, his eyes never leaving the horizon.

"Hey," Matt said. "We're on our way back. Checked with all the hospitals in the area, Ryner's colleagues--even managed to get in touch with the defensive forces. No one's seen any sign of Pidge, Ryner, or the Green Lion. Any luck on your end?"

"Not really..." Akira said. "But before we go, let's check the forest. Ryner's cell never came back to the city after the occupation. Maybe Pidge took her there."

* * *

Akira was right. Karen could tell from the moment they passed over the clearing at the center of the camp where Ryner's old cell still resided. They'd made their structures a little more permanent in the last few months, though most of what Karen could see looked like it was ready to be torn down or abandoned at a moment's notice. After a decade on the run, these people had developed certain precautions that weren't easily discarded after just a few short months of freedom.

Aransha was the first to greet them, standing at the edge of the clearing as Matt set his lion down, then crossing to meet them at the base of the ramp. Her face was strained, and Karen's relief surged in tandem with her worry.

"They're here?" she asked, breathless, as soon as she was close enough to do so without shouting.

Aransha's antennae slanted back. "They were. It would seem they left in the night without telling anyone."

" _Damn_ it," Matt hissed. His footsteps turned, pacing halfway back up the ramp before stalking to Karen's side once more. "Where did they go? _Why?_ Are they okay?"

"As okay as can be expected after burying a friend," Aransha said. "I tried to convince them to rest, but they... Well, they're upset, and they seemed to want to be alone. I was trying to be respectful in giving them space. I’m sorry."

"It's not your fault. Pidge is... stubborn, when they want to be." It was an effort to keep her voice level, but Karen had already let her frustration make an enemy of Keena. Best not to create any more drama if she could help it. "They didn't say anything about where they were going? Maybe the name of who they were going after?"

Aransha shook her head. "They didn't say a word the entire time they were here. At least, not to me. I've already started asking around, but if I'm being honest, I don't know how much information there is to find."

Karen's heart sank. She knew exactly the kind of silence Aransha was talking about. Stress had a tendency to make Pidge _more--_ more talkative, more defensive, more focused, louder and quick-tempered and always on edge--but it was not without limit. Push them too far, and they hit a wall, and then instead of a sharp-tongued argumentative bundle of nerves, what you ended up with was a silent shell of a person. Karen and Pidge might butt heads when they were stressed, but when Pidge reached the point of shut down, Karen got scared.

"You buried Ryner?" Val asked, her voice small. "Like... You _actually_... She's..."

Karen turned, and saw the same pallor on all three faces at her side. Val was on the verge of tears, Matt seemed to be looking for something to fight, and Akira just looked lost.

They hadn't believed it.

Oh, they would never say so, especially not to Karen's face. They all understood the adjunct bonds well enough to know that when she said Ryner was dead, it was more than a bad feeling or her fears running away from her. But there was a difference between knowing something to be true and _feeling_ it, and it seemed the reality was only just starting to hit the others.

Aransha's expression softened, and she took a step back, gesturing to the edge of the clearing. "I can take you to the legacy grove, if you'd like to pay your respects."

The way Matt recoiled said he wanted no such thing, but Karen started forward before anyone else had a chance to respond. Ryner had been a good woman, a friend. Karen hadn't been as close with the woman as she should have been. She'd always been more focused on Pidge, and even once she'd admitted that, her efforts to get to know Ryner were mediocre, at best. She could make all the excuses she liked--this was war, and time was short, and Ryner simply didn't need as much support as Pidge--but the simple fact was, she'd failed as an adjunct. The least she could do was honor the woman in death.

Aransha led the way to the grove, and Karen walked with her chin up, her eyes burning but the tears held at bay. Val kept pace with Karen, silent and withdrawn, her arms wrapped around her midsection. Matt and Akira lagged behind, but Karen didn't turn to see whether or not they were following. She couldn't force them to come if they weren't ready, and she herself had a weak grasp on her composure. If she slowed for even a moment, she feared she might lose her nerve.

The grove didn't look like a graveyard. That was a small mercy. If Karen had had to kneel beside Ryner's tombstone, see her name and the date of her death spelled out in cold stone letters, the way Matt and Sam and Shiro's names were spelled out on a small plaque at the Garrison, she might have cracked.

Instead, she found herself in an arboretum. Trees grew in neat rows all around--as many different kinds of trees as Karen could imagine. Most seemed to belong to one of a handful of genera--there were a some evergreens, a number that looked similar to an oak tree from Earth, some fruit trees with matching leaves but fruit that came in every shape and shade. But beyond the general structure of the trees, the arrangement of their leaves and sometimes the shapes, each tree might well have been the only one of its kind.

The paths that traced the rows of trees were clean-edged and well-kept, and sprigs of small flowers had been left as memorials at the foot the trees--the youngest in particular, which Karen presumed corresponded to more recent deaths.

Not that there were a great many _old_ trees here. Older than Karen would have expected, unless Olkari trees grew considerably faster than the ones Karen was used to. But most looked to only recently have passed beyond saplings, and there were a few even younger than that.

Ryner's tree was the youngest, but even this looked like it had had a solid year to grow before being transplanted here. Aransha hung back while Karen approached, her eyes tracing the silvery trunk, which glittered in the light of dawn, and the clusters of deep green leaves. It was pristine, ephemeral, and utterly unlike anything else in sight. Some trees looked to be made of metal, other to be fully organic, but none struck quite so delicate a balance. It looked like a magnificently detailed mechanical marvel, like a prize-winning plant raised with the utmost care to avoid even a single blemish or scar. Karen knelt in the fresh dirt beside it.

"Ryner mentioned this once," Karen said. "Legacies. You modify your trees so they'll do something for the community after you die." She looked up at Aransha. "What does this one do?"

"We don't know yet. Sometimes it takes a while for the legacy to fully express itself, and Ryner was the only one who knew how she programmed that seed."

Karen nodded, too numb to feel more than mildly disappointed. She couldn't even have said why. Because she couldn't satisfy her curiosity? Because Ryner's memorial felt incomplete without a fully expressed legacy?

Or was it simply that she didn't have enough time to process anything these days? Just when she started to wrap her head around one crisis, a new tragedy cropped up.

Footsteps crunching on loose dirt drew her eyes away from Ryner's tree, and she turned to see that Matt and Akira had joined them, after all. Matt's eyes were red, his posture guarded, and Akira hovered close, like some sort of bodyguard. He squeezed Matt's shoulder, and Matt offered him a feeble smile before kneeling carefully beside Karen and looking at the sapling.

"Sorry," he said, voice hoarse. "I just can't believe she's gone."

Karen pulled him against her side and kissed the top of his head. "I know. I can't either."

"Do you think Pidge is okay?"

Karen didn't have an answer for that, so she just held him tighter and watched the wind toss the emerald leaves of Ryner's legacy and prayed they found Pidge soon.

* * *

They didn't stay long. Not with Pidge still missing. Not with all four of them anxious and tired and itching just to find them and see for themselves that they were still okay.

Within the hour, they were back in the Red Lion, high in orbit over Olkarion. They still had no leads, and Akira had taken to pacing the cockpit, glaring at the control panels like they had personally offended him. If he'd had just a little more energy, Matt might have found the whole thing funny.

Instead, he just felt hollow.

"She's still not talking to you?" Matt asked.

Akira sighed, stopping and letting his head thump against the wall. "No. And I still don't know why."

_**Dangerous.** _

Matt sat bolt upright in his seat, his spine tingling with the tone of Red's warning--barely a whisper in his ear, and more feral impulse than actual words.

 _Dangerous?_ he repeated. _What's dangerous?_

Red growled, disgruntled, and Matt got the impression she hadn't meant for him to hear that. She shied away from his probing thoughts, and he groaned, sinking lower in his chair.

"What?" Akira asked. "She ignoring you, too?"

"Might as well be. I guess she thinks it's _dangerous_ to... I don't know? Talk to you? Hell if I know why."

Akira was quiet for a long moment, his frustration fading to thoughtfulness. He lifted his gaze to the ceiling. "Is this about what happened earlier?"

A twinge of guilt from Red, quickly cut off. Matt turned in his seat, but Val was quicker on the uptake.

"What happened earlier?" she asked.

Akira ran his fingers through his hair. "I'm not totally sure, to be honest. I was out with Kolivan and them, and we ran into this one robeast. Looked like a lion. I think it _was_ part Lion--like Keturah took samples from Red at some point and used them in some sort of re-creation."

Matt's chest constricted, and he hovered on an electric edge, Red's turmoil echoing his own. "She _what?_ "

Val looked like she was going to be sick. "That's horrible."

"Yeah." Akira smiled, the expression thin. "Once Red realized, she... I think she kind of... possessed me? I was still aware and everything, but I don't think I was the one pulling the strings. Red freaked out once she realized, and I haven't gotten anything from her since. I don't know if she thinks I'm mad at her or something, cause I'm not." He twisted, looking at Matt through his bangs. "Tell her I'm not angry? I'm not sure she's even listening to me."

Matt wasn't honestly sure she was listening to _him_ , but he turned his attention toward the bond, trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say.

Red roared into his hesitation. _**Of course he doesn't hate me yet. He doesn't know--**_

A conspicuous absence followed these words, and Matt cocked his head to the side. _Doesn't know what?_

Red hesitated, but she must have sensed Matt's thin patience. She obviously didn't want to talk about this, but it was standing between Matt and Pidge, and when it came down to it, Matt would always choose his family.

_**I thought I could hold back, but I put too much of me into him. I caught myself this time, but next time it could burn away everything that makes him him.** _

Akira paled when Matt relayed the message. "What does that mean, _burn away_?"

 _**I could destroy him,** _ Red said, quiet and matter-of-fact and oozing with shame. _**A human mind is not meant to hold all of me. I don't want to risk doing more damage than I already have.** _

"Is that a feature of the adjunct bond, then?" Karen asked, inching closer to Akira and puffing up like an angry cat. "Were you ever going to tell us?"

Red growled, irritation plain in the sound. _**It is not inherent to the bond. Tell her she has no reason to worry.**_

That did nothing to reassure Akira, who sank down into Keith's seat, his hand pressed to his forehead. "Okay... Okay." He sat up, his hand falling into his lap. "So what you’re saying is, as long as we don't go that far again, we're good?"

Red's surprise built into a growl that even, for a moment, pulled at Matt's lips. He caught himself, then turned and put his elbow up on the back of his seat to get a better look at Akira. "I mean... I guess? I think the point is that if you do anything, you _might_ end up going all the way."

Akira, though, shook his head. "Won't happen."

"But--"

"How's this? We all agree that Red and I will keep our distance if another cybernetic pseudo-clone shows up, but until then, I don't see any reason not to use the tools at our disposal."

Red was quiet again, but it was a loaded silence this time, and Matt got the impression that something was passing between Red and Akira. Something Matt wasn't privy to. After a moment, the atmosphere eased, and Akira sank back in his chair, shooting a relieved smile over his shoulder at Matt.

" _Now_ we're getting somewhere."

"She's talking to you again?" Val asked.

Akira waved his hand. "More or less." He paused. "Think you can convince her to let me fly her? Just this once; I know she's not crazy about anyone who's not you or Keith taking the wheel. But it'll be easier for me to just _go_ than to try to point you in the right direction."

Red was already resistant to the idea, even before Matt gave her a prod. She wasn't happy about reopening the link between her and Akira in the first place. For a moment, Matt thought asking to fly her was taking it a step too far. But she was tired, and Matt wasn't trying to hide his desperation, and Red grudgingly relented.

Matt nodded to Akira, who perked up, then turned and took up the controls. "Okay," he said. "Here goes nothing."

There was no sign that he'd slipped into the bond, if he entered the bond at all. Matt could sense him no more now than before, but Red moved according to his directions, and Matt was left to sit back and watch, aware of Red's eyes on Akira, but not of Akira himself.

Whatever he was doing, it seemed to take all his concentration. He fell silent, his eyes steady on the viewscreen, and Val and Karen retreated, giving him space to work. It was almost eerie, the way Akira faded into the motion and the chase. They flew for a time, apparently without a specific destination. Then, suddenly, Akira leaned forward and input a set of coordinates into the nav computer. He continued to say nothing, and Matt wasn't sure whether he even knew the rest of them were there. He was afraid to speak up and find out that Akira couldn’t even hear him.

The wormhole blossomed before them, and they plunged in without a word.

* * *

They remained in the wormhole for mere moments, but to Karen it felt far longer. Hours on top of hours on top of the days it had been since she’d last held Pidge in her arms. By the time the wormhole spit them out, she was on the verge of outright panic, and she let out a sob when she spotted the Green Lion ahead of them, drifting quietly among the stars. Val grabbed her arm and squeezed, Akira let out a rush of air and doubled over in his seat, and Matt...

Matt gave a small, pained sound. His eyes were fixed on the nearest planet, a gray, barren world that looked entirely unremarkable to Karen's eyes.

"Maorel," he said without prompting, then turned and looked at Akira. "That's where we are, right?"

Akira blinked, slow to lift his head. He seemed disoriented, and he took long enough to focus on Matt that Karen almost stepped in. Then he nodded. "I think so, yeah. You know it?"

"We came here once before--way back when we'd only just started to figure out about copiloting and everything. This was a robeast research lab, before we destroyed it."

Karen's heart constricted, and she looked again to the Green Lion. Why was Pidge here? What did they expect to find in the ruins of an old lab? Why _robeasts?_

The answers hovered on the tip of Karen's tongue, but the block was still in place, cutting her off from Green's knowledge. Pidge was just ahead, though, and that was all that mattered. She brushed past Matt and reached for the comms controls to connect with the Green Lion.

The call didn't go through. The loading symbol flashed on the screen, and Karen held her breath, but each passing second wound her nerves tighter and tighter.

Matt reached his breaking point a moment before Karen, and he opened the thrusters, careening across the system and nearly slamming into the Green Lion. They came to a stop just in time, and Matt was the first to stand and seal his helmet. “I'm going over there.”

Karen grabbed his wrist as he passed, her heart pounding. She hadn't been thinking of all the eventualities when she left New Altea to search for Pidge. Matt, Val, and Akira all had armor of their own, sturdy enough to protect them against a vacuum, with helmets that sealed and some small supply of oxygen to keep them alive.

"There should be emergency EVA suits in here somewhere," Val said, catching onto Karen's train of thought. Matt stiffened, screwing his eyes shut, and swerved away from the ramp.

"Right. Shit, sorry, Mom. Here." He found a suit for her--the simple Altean battlesuit she'd seen some of Coran's crew wear when they did repairs. It didn't have much armor, but the flexible material would get her from here to the Green Lion in one piece, and that was all that mattered. She shed her cardigan and shoes, but pulled the suit on over the rest of her clothes. It wasn't comfortable, but it was quick, and she'd been away from Pidge for too long already.

As soon as she was done, they headed over, Matt and Akira keeping close to Karen and helping to keep her on course. Unlike the rest of her family, she'd never been one for roller coasters or carnival rides or indoor skydiving. She preferred to keep her feet firmly on solid ground, and the deep end of a swimming pool was about as far as she ever strayed. She'd only just gotten used to riding in the Lions, and venturing out into zero-G was nothing short of terrifying.

But then they were there, and Matt left her side to open a small panel on the Green Lion's chest. Karen followed him inside, Akira trailing after her. Val was the last to enter, a far-off look on her face as she took in the catwalk they'd landed on and the complex machinery that surrounded them. Akira touched her shoulder, and she shook herself out of her contemplation, sealing the hatch behind her before the four of them charged up the nearest ladder toward the cockpit above.

Matt reached the cockpit first and stopped dead just inside the door, a strangled cry of, "Pidge," dying on his lips.

Karen shoved past him, and barely stopped herself from collapsing when she saw Pidge on the floor, leaning against the back of the pilot seat with their legs pulled up to their chest. They stared over their knees at Karen and Matt, and at Val and Akira as they filed in, too.

In another instant, Pidge's eyes welled up with tears, and their buried their face in their knees, their shoulders hunching up toward their ears. They curled their arms over their head and froze there, trembling slightly but otherwise not moving.

"Pidge?" Karen asked, creeping across the cockpit and dropping to her knees before Pidge. They said nothing. "Pidge, I'm so sorry. I-- I don't know everything, but I know about Ryner, and I'm so, _so_ sorry, baby."

Pidge was shaking harder, and when Karen put a hand on their shoulder, they unfurled, flinging themself against her as the floodgates burst. Karen curled around them, trying to squeeze the pain out of them, to take it on herself. She had so many questions--too many--and she knew sooner or later she was going to have to ask them, but for now she had her kid alive in her arms, and the relief that hit her was so powerful it knocked the breath from her lungs.

Matt joined them after only a moment, settling in behind Pidge and curling around their back. Val and Akira hung back without prompting, fading to the fringes of Karen's awareness as Pidge stumbled over a few fragmented words. She knew they were trying to talk more from the breaks in their breathing and the tension that took them in waves than from the broken, hiccuping sounds that made it past their lips.

"What happened?" Matt breathed, looking helplessly at Karen. His tone said he wasn't looking for real answers, only trying to voice his helpless frustration, but his words made Pidge tense.

"It's all right," Karen said, bowing her head over theirs. "You don't need to talk about it if you're not ready."

Pidge shook their head, breathing so quick Karen was worried they'd hyperventilate. "Ryner," they said, voice cracking on her name. "I... You should... Fuck. _Fuck. Green?_ "

This last was spoken with a desperation that brought tears to Karen's eyes, and she slid her hand around the back of Pidge's neck, the thumb of her other hand reaching up to wipe their tears away.

They looked up, then quickly away, and crumpled again toward her chest. "'m sorry."

The bond cleared.

Looking at Pidge, huddled and ashamed, and feeling the walls that had cut her off from Green dissolving, Karen had a moment of clarity herself. It wasn't a robeast who had clouded the bond, or some machination of Haggar's. It was Green, shutting her out just as Red had shut out Akira. Except that where Red had shut Akira out because of her own fear...

Green had shut Karen out because Pidge had begged her to.

There was no time to be hurt by this realization. A hundred others followed close on its tail:

Ryner was dead.

Sam had killed her.

Sam--they were controlling him the same way they'd once controlled Shiro--shoving him out of himself--and Pidge didn't know whether Sam was still in there somewhere, or if he'd been killed in the process of making him--

Dark Green.

A malicious shadow of the Green Lion.

Of course she had a paladin to mirror Green's.

Of _course_ they'd chosen Sam.

She should have expected that. She shouldn't have let this take her by surprise.

"Mom?"

Karen's eyes refocused on Matt, who was watching her with fear dawning on his face. Karen realized she'd clapped a hand over her mouth, and tears had begun to gather along the line her index finger traced. She breathed in, deep and rattling, and pulled Matt flush against her. Pidge was little more than a trembling lump between them--trembling with anticipation and dread. They must have known what it was Karen had just realized.

"Mom, you're scaring me. What is it?"

"Sam," Karen whispered. She didn't want to let either of her children go, but she needed to see the confirmation in Pidge's eyes. She needed to know she wasn't making it up. So she pulled back, keeping one hand on Matt's arm and cupping Pidge's cheek in the other. "You found him."

Matt's breath caught as Pidge nodded, miserably wiping their eyes. "Dad?" Matt asked. "Is he...?"

"They're controlling him." Karen's voice grew stronger with each word, the truth cementing inside her even without Pidge's confirmation. "They turned him into a weapon. A paladin connected to Dark Green. They used him to kill Ryner. Didn't they?"

Pidge nodded again, and burst into fresh tears. Karen gathered them close, reaching out for Matt with one hand as the knowledge washed over him. Somewhere behind Karen, Akira's breath left him in a hiss, and Val's muffled muttering could only have been a string of curses too emphatic to contain. Matt held himself apart for only a moment before curling forward, squeezing Pidge and muffling his own agony on Karen's other shoulder.

As her children fell to pieces in her arms, Karen felt herself teetering on the edge of the same breakdown. She wanted to rage. She wanted to scream and cry and throw herself on the injustice of it all.

She didn't have that luxury.

Her husband was still out there, a pawn in Haggar's games--but maybe not yet beyond saving. Her children were still here, and they needed her to be strong for their sake.

So she held them as they cried, and her tears ran dry long before theirs.

* * *

"All right," Karen said. It had been several minutes, and Akira remained at the back of the cockpit with Val, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. "The first thing to do is get back to the others. Then we'll figure out what our next step is."

Pidge tensed. Akira could see it from where he was, even with Karen and Matt both obscuring them from view. Karen hesitated, looking down at them, and Akira started forward before stopping himself. He wanted so badly to make all this better, to undo what Haggar had done and bring Sam back to his family in one piece.

But he couldn't, and he knew Matt and Karen were better suited to comforting Pidge than him.

Didn't make it any easier to sit back and watch.

As the seconds ticked by, though, and Pidge continued their attempt to disappear into Karen's chest, Val wavered, then stepped forward.

"Pidge?" she asked, cautious, like she felt as much like an intruder as Akira. She reached Karen's side and crouched down, her eyes tracking something along the ceiling. She seemed only half-aware of where she was, and Akira chased after her, afraid she was about to pass out on him.

She shook her head, and finally focused on Pidge.

"It hurts."

Pidge went still, turning slightly to watch Val. They didn't say anything, but Val nodded as though they had.

"Flying her--it hurts, doesn't it? The wound's too fresh."

Slowly, Pidge nodded, and Karen rubbed their back.

Matt pulled back, frowning at Val. "I don't think Red can tow her, if that's what you're thinking."

"No. I..." She hesitated, glancing again toward the front of the cockpit. "She'll let me fly her, I think. If you're not up to it right now. You can go with your mom and brother in Red, and I'll get Green back to the castle for you."

Pidge's eyes had gone wide, and they stared at Val, hardly breathing as Val rubbed the back of her neck.

"No pressure either way, of course. Just an option."

Pidge clutched at Karen's arm, but it was Karen who spoke. "You can do that?"

"I think so. Blue worked something out with the other lions. I guess each of us--each of Blue’s paladins, I mean--is connected to one of the others somehow. We only just found out about it, so I'm not sure what exactly it means, but... I'm pretty sure I can hear her, and I think she's telling me that she'd be okay with letting me fly her, at least for now. Unless she's telling you something else?"

Karen shook her head. "No, you're right. I just... I never knew that before. Pidge? Does that sound good to you?"

They nodded, and Karen helped them to their feet. She reached out to take Val's hand as she passed, and the two of them locked eyes. They didn't say anything; Pidge's red eyes and the way Matt hovered close behind said enough. When Karen glanced at Akira, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

"I'll hitch a ride with Val, yeah?"

She nodded. "Thank you. Both of you."

"Don't mention it," Val said. "We'll see you back at the castle."

Once the Holts left, the cockpit descended into silence. Akira placed a hand on Val's shoulder, and she smiled at him, then stepped up to the pilot seat, sat down, and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, and Akira felt the air around them change, thickening with anticipation. In the next instant, something clicked into place. The Green Lion hummed, and Val buckled in her seat, gasping softly, in surprise or in pain.

Maybe both.

Akira reached out for her, but she'd already recovered, swiping at her eyes and sitting up straight though it seemed to take a great effort. "I'm fine," she said. "Never bonded a second lion before."

"Uh-huh. Well." Akira turned and sat down, his back against her armrest. "I'm right here if you need me."

"Thanks, Akira."

"Any time. Now let's go home."

* * *

Keith was hiding.

Part of him felt bad for it--not for _hiding_ so much as for _using Lance_ as a way to hide.

He couldn't help it. He didn't want to deal with his mother anymore.

She'd cornered him earlier, without seeming to really corner him. She was good at that--making her intentions look innocent when they were anything but. They'd happened to pass in the hall, that was all. And there had happened to be no one around. And she'd smiled at him and smoothed back his hair and congratulated him on the victory.

 _Any problems on the homeworld?_ she'd asked, her smile not wavering, even when Keith deflected her questions. _Well, I'm glad you're okay. You and your... new friends. You'll have to introduce me later._

_I barely know them._

_Really? You seem so... close-knit._

What she meant, of course, was that there were so few of them. Nowhere near the army she'd asked for; just a handful of pilots who'd volunteered to help. Keith preferred it this way, but of course he'd never tell Keena that. She was disappointed enough as it was.

Fortunately for him, Karen had happened to pass their way at that moment. Keena forgot all about Keith when she saw Karen--there was bad blood between them Keith had never noticed before. He was surprised it didn't come to blows, but Karen pointedly ignored Keena as she informed Keith that Matt wanted to see him before they left, and Keena excused herself without another word.

She'd found him twice more since Red left. The first time Keith was conferring with Kolivan at Shiro's request, and Keena kept her distance. The next, their eyes locked across the room, and Keith ducked out before she had a chance to close the distance.

Ever since, Keith had tried not to go anywhere alone. He stuck close to Shiro, to Nyma, and most of all to Lance. He was probably safe for now; Shiro had asked to meet with Keena--the Accords were one of the most extensive intelligence networks in the universe, _and_ they had people inside the Empire. If anyone could find the castle-ship, it was Keena's agents.

Keith didn't envy Shiro having to work with her, smoothing whatever feathers might have been ruffled by... whatever had happened between her and Karen.

Keith would rather pretend none of that was happening. Instead he was here, holed up with Lance's family in the little lounge in the residential unit the paladins had been assigned. Carmen was at least attempting to sleep, though she didn't seem to be having much luck with it. Everyone else had occupied themself with something else. Everyone except Keith, who was wholly focused on Lance, and Lance, who was slumped down in his seat, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, arms crossed over his chest, and leg bouncing a hundred times a minute.

"You okay?" Keith asked.

Lance sat up straighter, turning his attention Keith's way.

His leg kept bouncing.

"What? Yeah, no, I'm fine. I'm cool."

Keith leaned against him, his own hands trapped between his knees. "No you're not."

Lance's face crumpled, but only for a minute. Then he shrugged, flopping backwards on the couch and pulling Keith with him. "No," he said. "I'm not. But I will be once we have a direction." He glanced around, as though suddenly remembering the rest of his family. He dropped his voice low, his arms looping around Keith's waist. "I just want them back."

Keith returned his hug. "I'm sure they're fine," he said. "Coran wouldn't let anything happen to them."

"Yeah..." Lance sighed, turning his face toward the back of the couch. "You're right." He didn't sound at all convinced.

* * *

Mateo's heart hammered in his chest as the gladiator passed by. Maka had pulled him back into a little niche in the wall--the closest thing to a hiding spot there was in this hallway--but it didn't feel like very much cover. Any second now, the gladiator was going to turn its head and spot them, and then they'd all be dead.

" _Vrekt,_ " Mateo whispered. He was well aware his pronunciation was horrible, but for once Maka didn't laugh at his accent or tease him for only using curses his mother didn't know to chide him for.

Things like that seemed a lot less funny when one wrong move could get you killed.

The gladiator passed on, and Maka darted out of hiding--too quick for Mateo's comfort. He ducked lower, craning his head to see where the gladiator had gone, before scrambling after Maka. Edi and Wyn, who had taken shelter a little further up the hall, had already emerged to join him, and the four of them crept onward, past rows of empty training rooms.

Mateo hadn't been to this floor very often. He knew Edi and Dagmar trained here with Allura sometimes. He knew Wyn had been sneaking off to join them, and that Maka knew about it, even though Wyn was afraid that if Maka knew, he'd tease him about it. But Mateo had only ever been here because Maka was taking him somewhere else and the training deck happened to be in between.

"Are we sure we shouldn't be worrying about the cameras?" Edi whispered. "Whoever took over the castle is probably watching right now, trying to track people down."

Maka scoffed, stopping at the next corner and peering around. "Please. We've got Wyn on our side. We don't need to worry about _cameras._ "

Mateo stared at the back of Wyn's head as Maka spoke. Wyn had been quiet ever since the attack. Hell, the last time he'd spoken was to warn them to get out of the cafeteria where all the kids had been gathered. Hadn't said much, just that they'd needed to go.

So they left--the four of them, plus Dagmar, Bee, and Luz. They'd found Tik in the hallways outside. No one was sure if he'd slipped out of the cafeteria or if he'd simply never been there in the first place, but the thing was, Tik was good at hiding--something that was especially lucky today, since it meant the rest of them had somewhere to hole up while the castle turned against itself.

Mateo hadn't left Tik's little hideout for long hours after it all began, but Edi and Maka both had, and they'd returned with stories of gladiator bots running amok, attacking people in the hallways and dragging them away... if they didn't just kill them where they stood. The clangs, hisses, and screams from elsewhere in the castle suggested the gladiators weren't the only things going haywire, but no one wanted to venture too far from safety.

At least, not until they had weapons.

Which was why they were here, headed for the largest training deck--the one that the paladins usually used. Edi said they could access the armory from there and pick out weapons for themselves.

It didn't feel real. Mateo had never held a weapon before. Well, he'd held Lance's bayard once, but it wouldn't activate for him, so Mateo wasn't sure that counted. But most of the others were younger than Mateo--everyone except Maka and Wyn, who only sort of counted, seeing as he was Altean and already older than Mateo’s grandparents. Mateo couldn't let the others do all the fighting while he sat back and let them protect him.

He was probably going to be less than useless, but he was here, and that had to count for something.

Edi watched Wyn now, a frown pulling at her lips. Her ears were sloped back, too, broadcasting her worry to the world. "Wyn?" she asked.

For a moment, Wyn didn't respond, just stared at Maka, who watched around the corner for another long moment before gesturing for them to move on. Edi touched Wyn's shoulder, and he jumped, turning to stare at her with wide eyes.

"Is that true?" Edi asked. "Can you... People say you can... do things."

Maka's head lolled back, and he groaned at the ceiling. "He's a technopath, Edi. Aren't you?"

After a moment's hesitation, Wyn nodded.

"So, what?" Mateo asked. Maka had grabbed Wyn's arm and started dragging him along, and Mateo hurried to keep up. "You're turning the cameras off?"

Wyn shrugged, but nodded as though to say, _Close enough._

Mateo caught Maka staring at Wyn, his brow pinched in concern. Mateo felt it too--like a fist squeezing his insides. Wyn had always been quiet--quieter than Maka and Mateo, anyway. But not like this. He still _talked._ He still answered questions, when someone asked. Mateo tried to brush it off, tried to tell himself Wyn wasn't _all that much_ quieter now, when you considered everything that was happening. _Everyone_ was quieter, even Luz.

Especially Luz.

Mateo screwed his eyes shut and told himself not to think about Luz. She was safe with Dagmar, Bee, and Tik back in the little hidden room beyond the vents. The gladiators couldn't possibly get to them; Edi and Maka even had some trouble getting through the vents, and they were both way shorter than the robots.

They just had to finish up here, and then Mateo would be able to get back to Luz and make sure she was okay.

He just had to focus.

Then, there it was. The main training deck. A plain set of doors--double doors, wider than the doors to the other training rooms around them. Aside from the size, they didn't look all that different from the rest of this floor, but Mateo's heart fluttered at the sight of them. They were almost done with this. Get in there, get some weapons...

The sound of heavy footsteps, fast approaching, made Mateo's pulse triple, and he spun, staring back down the hallway.

"In," Edi hissed. "Quick."

Maka was already at the door. The hiss of it opening grated on Mateo's ears, but he sprinted through, flinging himself against the wall beside the door. Wyn was a little slower, but he didn't stop when he was out of sight of anyone in the hall; he kept backing up, retreating toward the corner. He covered his ears with his hands.

Edi was the last one into the room. The door closed behind her, and she took up post on the other side of the it. She looked so different now, compared to the girl Mateo had gotten to know. Harder. _Older._ It was easy to forget that the Galra kids on the castle-ship had mostly all grown up in the Empire. Some of them--Edi, Maka, Dagmar and Bee--were related to officers or other important somebodies. Maka had mentioned it once, before Edi shut him down.

They'd all been training to be soldiers, before they got themselves kicked out and sent to Revinor for one reason or another.

(Mateo was still a little hazy on what _Revinor_ was, except that everyone got the same look on their face when someone brought it up, like they'd just stepped in dog poop.)

Mateo had never stopped to think about what it meant, that training. He'd never really thought of any of them as warriors. He'd assumed they were just regular kids like him, now that they were on the castle-ship.

That wasn't true at all.

Maka wasn't joking around now, wasn't laughing, wasn't complaining about Edi being uptight and bossy. He'd dropped low, his ears cocked toward the door, one hand reaching for the wall, feeling for a switch or something Mateo couldn't see. Edi was unarmed, but she looked ready to leap into battle with nothing but her bare claws. Claws that, for the record, Mateo hadn't paid all that much attention to since Galra and Alteans became the norm.

The claws were out now, and impossible to miss.

And Mateo was _so_ far out of his league.

The footsteps were still coming, and Wyn's back had hit the wall, but he looked like he was still trying to retreat. Maka and Edi tensed--

And the door opened.

Edi sprang into action at once, tackling the first gladiator before it was fully through the door. Her growl was too big and too deep for her frame, a threat that even had Mateo cowering back. The gladiator stumbled, but recovered quickly, grabbed Edi by the collar, and flung her across the room.

"Edi!" Mateo cried.

" _Vrekt,_ " Maka muttered. " _Vrekt, vrekt, vrekking--_ "

He turned, devoting his full attention to the search of the wall until he found what he was looking for. A rack of weapons descended from the ceiling--swords, knives, staves, and more weapons Mateo couldn't name. Across the room, Edi was just picking herself up off the floor, the gladiator closing in on her as Maka dove for the weapons. He pulled out a sword nearly as tall as he was, and stumbled when he tried to lift it.

A second gladiator entered the room, swinging for Maka and forcing him to defend himself rather than go to Edi's aid. The first blow knocked the sword from his hand and sent it spinning across the room.

The next instant, both gladiators froze. It was like time had stopped; there was no waver in their frames, like they were fighting against an invisible force that was holding them back. No hum of machinery straining to work as normal. Just... silence.

Mateo turned. Wyn was wedged into the corner, but he didn't look like he was trying to retreat any longer. He was as still as the gladiators, his wide eyes fixed on the nearer of the two. His hand, at his throat, was shaking, but that was the only sign he was alive. Mateo didn't think he was even breathing.

Edi was the first to break the frozen moment. She pushed herself up off the ground, listing to one side, and made a break for the weapons rack. Where Maka had waffled for a moment, trying to choose a weapon from the array, Edi's hand went straight for an unremarkable metal rod. It was only about a foot long, but as she drew it from the rack and spun into a ready position, it extended until it was three feet long, shimmering white metal that glowed blue at either end.

Within moments, it was clear that Edi had trained with this weapon. She spun, the staff moving like part of her body. Mateo watched, transfixed, as she descended on the gladiator who had attacked Maka. Her staff cracked across the back of its head, and it tipped over--still frozen, and unable to compensate for the blow.

But Edi didn't stop there. She spun again, and drove one end of the staff into the gladiator's chest as it fell. The glow intensified, a burst of sparks skittering across the gladiator's armor.

When it hit the floor, the light in its eyes had gone out.

The second gladiator twitched at the same moment that Wyn sucked in a deep, gasping breath, and Edi didn't give it a chance to attack. She finished it the way she'd finished the other, and maintained her final pose for a long moment before deactivating her staff and straightening up.

Maka stalked over to the sword he'd dropped and picked it up, shooting a dirty look Edi's way. "Show-off."

She turned, ear flicking in irritation. "It's not my fault I actually kept up with my training." She paused, her lips turning down. "You picked _that_ thing? Really?"

Maka held the sword closer to his chest, narrowing his eyes. "What? Keith uses a sword."

Mateo stifled a laugh as Edi shook her head. Rather than respond to Maka, though, she just crossed to the weapons rack and started selecting weapons--another staff like hers and three knives, which were much shorter than the sword Maka had grabbed. She handed one to Maka with a pointed frown, and passed the other two to Mateo and Wyn. "Unless either of you are trained with something else...?" She gave them a moment to respond, and when neither said anything, she nodded. "Dagmar uses a staff, like me."

Maka wrinkled his nose at his knife, then stalked back over to the wall and hit the hidden button. The weapons rack retracted into the ceiling, and a different one descended in its place. "Stun batons for Tik and Luz, you think?" He grabbed them without waiting for a response and tossed them to Mateo, who dropped them both, along with the knife Edi had given him. He leaped back, heart pounding at the thought of losing a toe to his own clumsiness.

Maka ignored him and grabbed a pair of pistols, which he clipped to his belt.

" _Maka,_ " Edi snapped.

He scowled at her. "We can't do all our fighting up close, Edi. Not with literal battle robots everywhere. Besides, I trained with guns more than I trained with anything, and you _know_ Bee won't touch anything else."

Edi sighed, but she didn't argue.

That, more than anything, hammered home just how bad things were. Yeah, they'd come here looking for weapons to defend themselves, but somehow Mateo had imagined that meant clubs and things. Improvised weapons. _Safe_ weapons. Even Edi's staff fit with what he'd imagined, sparky ends not withstanding. But _guns?_

"Let's go," Edi said. "Before more of these things find us. Wyn, you good?"

Mateo turned, but Wyn had already left the corner. He rejoined the others by the door, staring at the knife in his hand. His face was oddly blank, his eyes far-off, but he nodded when Edi called his name again, and he clipped the knife's sheath to his belt. Mateo did the same, feeling more than a little awkward about the new weight--the knife and the two stun wands.

This was what he'd wanted. He could have stayed behind--Edi and Maka had both offered to go without him, to let him stay behind and watch Luz and the others. It was his own fault he'd refused.

He'd just have to get used to this.

After all, no one knew what had happened, or how long it would be before rescue came. They had to take care of themselves.

And Mateo wouldn't let anything happen to his sister. However weird he felt carrying a knife, he'd put up with it, as long as it meant Luz was safe.

He didn’t have a choice anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, if you haven't been keeping up with the Dualityverse [Bad Things Happen Bingo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15698712/chapters/36483450) series, don't worry. Most of the prompt fills aren't strictly canon. I would, however, recommend you at least read chapter 2 (Alluri: Worked Themself to Exhaustion) as it's the only one up so far I would consider to be canon to the main storyline, as well as chapter 8 (Keith: Touch Starved), which is not canon but does offer some good insight into the Red Lion as a character.


	2. In the Walls of the Castle of Lions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Matt, Karen, Akira, and Val found Pidge and the Green Lion. Pidge is in no condition to fly, so Val took up Green's controls to fly her home. Meanwhile the rest of the paladins have been waiting on New Altea for a lead on the castle-ship, where Edi, Maka, Wyn, and Mateo have succeeded in securing weapons with which to defend themselves against the gladiators that have gone rogue.

"Okay, where are we at?"

It was cold. Maybe because they were outside the well-trafficked areas of the castle-ship, and the heating grid either didn't work well here or had never been properly installed to begin with.

Or maybe it was another attack.

"I mean... we've got, like, eight people here, and half of us have absolutely no self-defense training."

"Jeez, Dagmar. Try to be a little more optimistic, why don't you?"

"The castle-ship is possessed, fuzzbrain. _How_ , exactly, am I supposed to be optimistic about that?"

Possessed.

That was a good word for it.

The others all thought someone had boarded them. Killed or incapacitated the crew, manually shut down the security measures and taken over the bridge. They were talking in hyperbole because they were scared, but they thought they were up against an ordinary enemy. They weren’t. Nothing about this was ordinary.

"Okay. Okay! Calm down. We've got enough to worry about without fighting each other, so let's just... Think this through. What advantages do we have?"

"We've... got weapons? And at least a couple of you know how to use them."

"Yes. Thank you, Mateo. The Empire thinks we're helpless, but we aren't, are we? _Are we,_ Maka?"

A grumbled response, followed by a sigh. "No."

"Mm. What else?"

"We've got the hidey-hole. And nobody but me and Pip know about this place.... And you guys, now, I guess. But the Empire don’t know about it."

"We've got each other. You've been training with Allura for ages now, Edi. You know what to do. And Bee can build just about anything, and--"

"And we've got Wyn."

Seven pairs of eyes turned Leth's way. (Not seven; six. The human girl was ignoring the whole conversation, like she had been for most of the day, and her eyes barely flickered in Leth’s direction before returning to the torn red lion toy she'd been fussing over for the last twenty minutes. Leth thought she was trying to sew it up, but with neither needle nor thread, she wasn’t making much progress.)

Leth shrank back, wishing they had something to hide behind to dampen the intensity of all those gazes.

_Wyn._

That was their name. Or at least... that was the only name these people knew. The only name _Leth_ had known for a very long time.

Once, it had fit them. Not anymore.

They wrapped their arms around their legs and turned away, hoping the conversation would move on if they just refused to engage. The others had to be used to them spacing out by now, seeing as it had been happening on and off since...

Since this all started, whenever that had been. They'd been too confused for too long to take a guess at time frame.

Frankly, they weren't really sure how long they'd been... _not_ themself.

The presence clinging to the castle's walls, though... _that_ they knew. They'd have recognized that horrible, icy stain anywhere. They had, after all, been exposed to it every day for as long as they remembered.

(Almost every day. There had been a few times, recently, when the air was a little clearer, their mind a little clearer--and a little less clear at the same time. Times when they'd started to feel as though _Wyn_ was an ill-fitting label and the name _Leth_ rose from the depths of their awareness to take its place.)

Haggar was here.

She had been, they thought, for as long as they'd been in this strange, serene castle with the pristine walls and the warm light and the laughter of people Leth didn't know but who seemed to know them.

True to form, the others moved on--Mateo on the verge of panic and seeking reassurance at every turn, Maka puffing himself up (probably trying to act like this Keith person he kept mentioning), and Edi doing her best to hold them all together. The other kids, the younger ones, were holding up in their own way--denial, distraction, whatever. Leth didn't remember their names or how they all knew each other, but Edi, Maka, and Mateo they'd mostly got straight, and seeing as they were the ones who expected the most out of Leth, they figured that was good enough for now.

They didn't think any of them had figured out it was Haggar. Not yet.

They weren't honestly sure any of the others knew who Haggar _was_ , and Leth sure wasn't going to be the one to broach that subject. Not with a handful of strangers who only thought they knew who they were talking to.

The currents stirred again, and Leth's gaze drifted to the wall. They couldn't see Quintessence, exactly, and there wasn't much in these walls anyway--none of Haggar's, to be sure. She couldn't reach them here.

That was the only thing keeping them from panicking.

It wouldn't last for long. Haggar might still be distant, might not be aware of this place, but she permeated every other piece of this vessel, as much of it as Leth could sense and then some. They'd done their best to keep her ignorant of the group they'd ventured out with, and for the most part they'd succeeded, but only because Haggar was still finding her footing. As she grew stronger--and she _was_ getting stronger--she spread her awareness around. Soon she wouldn't need cameras and robots to see the people running lose in her ship.

And then they'd be back to how it had been before the paladins. Before the endless pain faded to calm darkness and a distant sort of contentment that might as well have belonged to someone else.

It was okay. They were used to the kind of pain she doled out. If worse came to worse, they could endure it again.

* * *

"Luz. Luz, would you just _talk_ to me?" Mateo took a step closer, crouching down to try to catch his sister's eye.

She just turned away, hugging Tik's dumb Red Lion toy to her chest. "Leave me alone."

Leave her alone. Sure. He'd only been doing that for half a day now, hoping if he gave her some space she might not scream at him like she had when he'd first dragged her into the vents. It was like she'd _wanted_ to be captured, the way she'd fought. _What about Lance?_ she'd shrieked, her elbow hitting him in the teeth as he tried to shush her. _What about Mom and Dad? They told us to wait_ _here_ _!_

It didn't seem to matter how many times Mateo told Luz that the cafeteria was dangerous now, or how clearly he tried to explain that their parents weren't coming for them. She'd thrown a tantrum as big as any she'd thrown when she was a toddler, and he'd had to actually drag her through most of the vents, hissing at her all the while to shut up before somebody found them.

It was only the screaming in the halls that had saved them, and when they'd finally made it to Tik's secret room, Mateo hadn't been able to stop himself from shouting at her until she finally shut up. (He wasn't proud of that, but he was scared and frustrated, and he didn't know how to calm Luz down the way Lance or their parents might have.)

She hadn't so much as looked at him since, instead picking up the stuffed lion and fiddling with its ripped leg until Mateo half expected it to come off in her hand.

" _Luz._ " He stopped himself before he started shouting again. He took a deep breath instead and scooted forward a little, still in a crouch, so he was in Luz's line of sight again. "Luz, I know you're scared."

"I'm not scared."

He pursed his lips and ignored the blatant lie. "We all are. But I promise, we're going to get out of this, okay? Here. I brought you this." He held out the stun baton Maka had picked for her from the armory. "You hold it like this, see? And squeeze it here." The long, thin white spike lit up with a blue glow that fuzzed, setting Mateo's teeth on edge. "You shouldn't need it, but just in case, okay? Just in case anyone finds us here."

Luz wrinkled her nose and turned away without taking the stun baton, and Mateo stifled a groan.

“Luz, I’m serious. Things are bad out there, and I don’t know if we’re going to be safe here. I’m trying to protect you.”

She muttered something under her breath, too low for Mateo to hear.

“What?”

“I _said_ , Lance could protect me better than you.”

Mateo flinched back, his cheeks heating up and his hands curling into his fists. “You think I don’t know that? Of _course_ Lance would do a better job! But he’s not here right now. It’s just you and me and the others, and an entire _army_ out there who wants us dead!” Luz curled in on herself, and Mateo ran a hand down his face before thrusting the stun baton forward again. “Look, we need to be ready for anything, okay? So would you just take the dumb thing?"

Luz huffed, grabbing it out of his hand and hurling it at the wall in a single motion. "Happy?" she asked.

Mateo wanted to scream. He _really_ did. His hands clenched on empty air as he stood up, reminding himself that he was only making things worse by shouting like this. Lance wouldn’t do that. Their mother wouldn’t. Their dad _definitely_ wouldn’t. But Mateo wasn’t any of them, and he was out of patience. "You know, I know this is scary, but that doesn't mean you have to be such a baby."

Her nostrils flared as she glared up at him, and for a second, he thought she might actually attack him. Jump up and shove him, or maybe bite him, like she had when she was younger. Instead, she just dropped her gaze and hugged her lion closer. "I'm _not_ a baby," she muttered.

"Then stop acting like one."

Mateo stormed off before it turned into a fully fledged shouting match. He was too tired for something like that, and this room was too small to get away from Luz if she did decide to throw another tantrum. He’d tried to be fair to her. He knew she was scared, and she'd never been good at dealing with it when bad things happened. She'd been just like this when the Garrison told them Lance had died--flipping between screaming tantrums and stubborn silence without warning, and hardly saying a single word to him for two weeks.

He was no better at dealing with her moods now than he'd been last year, and there were bigger issues to worry about now, anyway. So he left Luz to sulk and rejoined Maka and Edi, who were trying to figure out what to do next. Mateo might be useless next to the two of them, but it gave him something to think about that wasn’t how much he missed his family.

* * *

"We _have_ to get out there," Maka said. Contrary to what Edi thought, he was, actually, making an effort to remain level-headed. It was _hard_ , with her being completely unreasonable, but he was making an effort. "There are people out there who need us!"

" _Need us?_ " Edi laughed. "Need _us._ We're not the paladins, Maka. We're not soldiers. We're _kids._ And we've got other kids, _younger_ kids we need to take care of."

"There were other kids in the cafeteria," Maka pointed out. "Shouldn't we be trying to protect them?"

Edi's face said she wasn't amused. "We're not going out there again. We have weapons, we have a hiding spot, and we know the paladins are out there somewhere. Sooner or later, they're going to come rescue us. In the mean time, we should just sit tight and stay safe. Who's going to take care of Luz and Tik if we get ourselves killed?"

Maka growled, turning to pace Tik's hidey-hole in an attempt to blow off steam. The space wasn't very big--maybe the size of one of the single rooms on the residential floors. With eight of them in here, even without any furniture or anything at all beyond a few heaps of pillows and three blankets, it was starting to get cramped, and Maka had to step over Dagmar's legs and Bee's... _project_... just to reach the far side of the room.

"Maka's right."

Maka turned, surprised that it was Mateo who had spoken up. Mateo was one of Maka's best friends, but he was also... kinda sheltered. Maka tried not to blame him for that, but he knew the attack today had rattled him, and Maka was surprised he'd dragged himself out of this room once.

Maka dropped his hands to his side. "Seriously?"

Lifting his head, Mateo looked around the room, wincing when he realized he'd drawn everyone's attention. Even Bee looked up from whatever it was she was building. "Seriously. We didn't see anyone while we were out there. You didn't see anyone when you went out the first time."

No one _alive,_ at any rate, but Maka didn't need to say that. Even the people who hadn't seen the dead bodies knew they were out there. They'd all heard the screams, and they all knew what screams like that meant.

"There have to be some survivors," Mateo went on, his voice shaking. "Right? They couldn't have killed _everyone_."

"But unless they found somewhere to hide," Maka said, then glanced to Wyn, " _and_ have a technopath to cover their tracks... We have to assume they've all been captured. Which means until the paladins show up, we're the only hope any of them have."

Edi pursed her lips. "Let's not get dramatic."

Maka bit back a groan. "Dramatic? Edi, take a look around. The castle's been boarded. People are _dead_. We don't even know if Coran's still alive, or when anyone's gonna find us and come help. I'm not going to sit around and hope things get better."

"No, you're going to go out there and get yourself killed because you want to be a hero."

"And you're going to get us _all_ killed because you're too scared to even go out there and see what's going on. What if there _are_ other people out there? What if we can help each other?"

"What if we can get a message out?" Dagmar's voice was low, but she effectively put a stop to Edi's counterargument.

Bee held up a spirally-looking thing and turned it over so it caught the light. "She's got a point, you know,” she said, distracted. “Have you checked your comms units?"

"They're blocked," Maka said. "I know."

Bee tipped her head to the side. "If there's anywhere where the comms aren't blocked, it'll be the bridge. If Coran's crew really is dead--"

" _Captured_ ," Edi said with a pointed look in Luz's direction, though Luz hadn’t showed any sign that she was paying attention to anything since Mateo had tried talking to her an hour ago.

Bee rolled her eyes. "Sure. If Coran's crew really is ‘captured,’ then there's no one to get a message to the paladins. They can't come get us if they don't know where we are."

It was a chilling thought. For all Maka wanted to get out there and _do_ something, there was still part of him that was waiting for the paladins to swoop in and save the day. He could handle things in the mean time--and handle them way better than Edi seemed to think--but not even Maka was stupid enough to think a couple of thirteen-year-olds could take back an entire castle on their own.

One look at Edi said she was just as freaked out as him. She looked at him, and for once she didn't look like the know-it-all she pretended to be.

She just looked scared.

"We have to get out there," Maka said, staring Edi in the eyes. "Get to the bridge, see what the situation is, then go from there. I can go alone if you want--"

"You're _not_ going alone. It's way too dangerous."

"I'll go," Mateo said.

Maka turned, his chest tight. Mateo still looked terrified--small and scrawny and basically helpless. Humans were such a squishy species, when you got right down to it.

But you didn’t always get the option to stay out of the war. Everyone in this room knew that. Sometimes the war came to you, and all you could do was decide how to respond. Maka had been too little to remember the battle that had killed his parents, but he knew they hadn’t been soldiers. If they hadn’t worked on an occupied planet full of people willing to fight back, Maka probably would have had a cushy life.

But things worked out the way they worked out, and Maka had been adopted by a military family that shipped him off to training when he was eight. Didn’t matter that he didn’t want anything to do with the war that had orphaned him; all he could do was learn what he could from his teachers on the _Reaper_ and fight back by pulling pranks and ditching training and talking back to every adult on the ship until he finally got himself kicked out.

So, really, he was in no position to tell Mateo what to do.

"Okay," Maka said, clapping a hand on Mateo’s shoulder. "Let's go."

* * *

"Coran?"

A hum was all the more of a response he could give. There was a dull ache in his side, a pounding in his head, and a fatigue so deeply rooted it made thinking hard.

Zuza reached out a hand to steady him, and it was only then that he realized he'd been listing to one side. Tev was quiet in his arms--unconscious or hanging on an edge, his skin warm to the touch and a trickle of blood oozing from a cut near his hairline. It didn't look particularly bad, but Tev hadn't moved since Keturah’s last attack had hit him.

Coran hadn't seen what it was that hit the boy--screens and panels had been careening around the room, lightning and raw Quintessence choking the air. Coran had taken a bit of a beating himself--and that was before Keturah sent in the gladiators.

It was a miracle they'd escaped at all.

It was, sadly, not unexpected that the three of them were _all_ that had escaped.

The rest of his crew was still alive, at least, or they had been when Coran had taken Tev and Zuza and run. He held onto that hope and refused to think of the worst outcome. Besides, these two kids needed him. _Kids._ He couldn't stop thinking about how young they were. Yes, they'd grown up in a war. Yes, they'd trained to be soldiers. Yes, they continued to choose to fight, even now.

They were still too young to deal with everything this war had put them through. They were _far_ too young to die.

That had been the deciding factor, in the end--seeing Tev helpless on the ground. Coran had fully intended to stay with his crew to the end, to fight, maybe to die, to protect his people and his home from Keturah's attack.

But Tev's life was at stake, and the bridge was lost.

So Coran had run. If Tev and Zuza were the only ones he'd managed to save, then he would have to accept that, and protect them with everything he had left.

However little that was.

" _Coran._ "

Coran hummed again, but managed to focus on Zuza, who was staring at him with wide eyes, her hand trembling where it rested on his shoulder.

Was she scared on his account?

Coran stiffened his spine, adjusting his grip on Tev. The boy shifted against his chest, and something shifted in Coran's back, sending a sharp spear of pain down his spine. His breath caught, and he stopped between one step and the next, but he didn't let himself fall. He refused to cry out in pain. Zuza was counting on him; he had to keep up the illusion of strength, even if he felt inches from collapse.

"Terribly sorry, my girl," he said with a smile. "What were you saying? I'm afraid I was zoning out."

Zuza snorted, snapping her mouth shut on words that sounded entirely too reproachful to be directed at the captain of this ship. "Yeah," she said. "I noticed. I just... Where are we going? What are we going to do? The castle--your _crew_ \--"

"It's going to be fine, Zuza. Chin up."

"Chin up?" She laughed, a sound on the edge of hysteria. "How are you so optimistic about this? We're alone in hostile territory, Coran. You and Tev are injured. The rest of the crew is captured, if not _dead_. What are we going to do? Do you think the escape pods are even running anymore?"

Coran's steps slowed. The escape pods. Truth be told, he hadn't even thought about them. He _ought_ to have, of course--for Tev and Zuza's sake, if not his own. The castle-ship was far too dangerous for them right now, and Coran should have been thinking of ways to get them to safety, not only ways to retake his ship.

Foolish plans, and he knew it. Keturah's AI was linked into every major system on the castle-ship. She had access to the cameras and security grid, to the archives, to the maintenance and personnel logs. She didn't, by default, have access to the comms or the weapons--but she didn't, by default, have access to the teludav and engines, either, and Coran had already seen just how _default_ her capabilities were in that regard.

"I don't know," he said. Now wasn't the time for claims of false bravado, and painting a rosy picture for Zuza would do more harm than good in the long run. So he opted for honesty--tactful honesty, to be sure, but honesty nonetheless. "There are entirely too many thing I don't know right now, to be honest. The first step is to get somewhere safe."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't our enemy _literally_ the castle itself?"

"An artificial intelligence integrated into the castle itself," Coran said, "but that’s a fair point."

"So?"

Coran glanced over his shoulder. They'd left the main corridors behind long ago, the itch of camera lenses against the back of his head too much to bear for long. The cameras were more sparse through the maintenance corridors, and Coran knew their range precisely enough to guide Zuza through mostly unseen.

The mischievous days of his youth were relics of a distant past, but let it not be said that his gallivanting had been for naught.

They were still, technically, on the grid, however, and Coran didn't trust Keturah not to have figured out some way to stay apprised of traffic through these back corridors even without the cameras or the holographic projectors that allowed her to manifest.

A plain door was set into the wall in the corner ahead, well out of the camera's view. There was no official record of that door in any of the castle's databanks. It wasn't on the official schematics; it contained no equipment that would draw power or vents that would affect the air flow through the ventilation system. There wouldn't be a record of the reconfiguration, either, however far back you went in the archives.

This room, and a handful others like it, had been built by hand in the early days of the castle's construction. If they'd ever been noticed, they would have been passed off as temporary structures meant to be used during the construction process and then reabsorbed during subsequent reconfiguration cycles.

What no one knew was that the parameters inherent in the reconfiguration system excluded spaces like these. They weren't marked as exempt; they simply... didn't exist to be reshaped.

Even Alfor hadn't known about them. Only Coran's grandfather, the castle's chief architect, and a half dozen hand-picked members of his crew--and Coran, of course, by virtue of being his granddad's favorite.

He tucked Tev against his chest and reached out to input a code into a camouflaged keypad, using his body to shield the keypad from Zuza's sight. She wasn't even watching, but Coran's grandfather had instilled the importance of this secret into his soul. He would bring people here, when the situation demanded it, but he would tell them no more than they needed to know.

"What is this place?" Zuza asked, frowning as she followed Coran inside. The room was dark--dormant--until Coran pressed his hand to a panel beside the door and infused it with a portion of his own Quintessence.

The spark of energy kickstarted the room's generator, powering up the crystal tracks set into the ceiling. They lit the room with a dim glow, luminous patterns tracing the edges of the room and spiraling toward the center like a whirlpool. Coran had to squint to make out the rest of the room's contents, which amounted to fairly spartan accommodations. Four narrow bunks could be extended from the walls, and a recessed closet held bedding for them, plus enough to accommodate up to four other people. A low-grade stasis chamber held enough food to last four people for up to two movements without rationing, and an opaque panel hid the toilet and shower from sight. Another panel hid a small arsenal--four pistols, four energy blades, and four collapsible staves.

Coran bypassed all of this, heading instead for the locker in the left-hand corner of the room. Like everything else in here, it was unremarkable--plain metal, with a crisp, clean label on the front at eye level.

_Medical Supplies_

Coran's grandfather had never told him why he'd built these chambers, though their contents painted an illuminating picture. Weapons, medicine, and rations enough to last for weeks, and direct comms to the other hidden chambers--hard-wired into the castle's infrastructure, not wireless like ordinary comms. Anyone holed up in these rooms could talk to each other freely without having to worry about their conversations being intercepted.

He'd know something like this would happen.

Either that, or he'd expected the paladins and the royal family to go off the rails at some point. Or to betray each other. Why else would Coran have been entrusted with this secret, but not Alfor or Allura?

It was a discomforting thought, and Coran shoved it aside as he opened up the medical locker and began to take inventory of their supplies. There was no cryopod here, unfortunately; such a device would have been far too large a draw on the main power grid to go unnoticed, and a portable generator like the one that powered the rest of the room never would have been able to support a cryopod in action.

There were other supplies, though. Localized healing units, painkillers, bandages and splints, antibiotics, antitoxins, and a handful of other common medicines, all kept in another small stasis chamber.

Coran ignored most of it, grabbing a healing unit and a diagnostic scanner. He secured the healing unit around Tev's head and neck and switched it on, only then powering up the scanner to see what he was dealing with. The results weren't as bad as he'd feared--nothing the healing unit couldn’t handle, given enough time.

Coran sighed, leaving Tev on the cot where he'd set him while the healing unit did its work.

"Is he going to be okay?" Zuza asked, cautiously approaching as Coran extended a second cot and took a seat.

He smiled at her, doing his best to look optimistic. "Perfectly. It may take some time--those healing units aren't nearly as powerful as what we have up in the infirmary. But he's not in any danger. Give him a day or so, and he'll be back on his feet."

Zuza breathed out a sigh as she sank down onto the cot beside Coran. "Okay," she said. "Are _you_ going to be okay?"

Coran started to brush off her concern--an automatic reflex after spending the last year with the paladins, who were far too empathetic for their own good sometimes. He stopped himself now, though, forcing himself to face the fact that he couldn't simply brush this one off.

He flashed a crooked smile at Zuza. "There's another healing unit in the locker. Do me a favor and help me position it?" He touched his fingertips to his side and winced. "Not that this is anything to worry about, but I'm going to want to be in top shape before I go out again."

Zuza, who had crossed to the medical locker so quickly Coran had to wonder if she'd been holding herself back from forcing the healing unit on him, turned with the device clutched to her chest. "You're going back out there?"

"I'll want to get a handle on the situation, see if there are any others I can bring back here..." Figure out how to take his ship back, though he suspected saying so out loud would only make Zuza worry more. "I'll need you to watch Tev while I'm gone, if that's all right with you."

Zuza pursed her lips, which told Coran she knew what he was really offering: a way for her to stay out of danger. An excuse not to venture out to where Keturah might hurt her. Coran could see her fear--but, in all fairness, he really _didn't_ want to have to leave Tev here alone. True, he wasn't in any danger from his wounds, now that the healing unit was doing its job, and, true, there was no way Keturah ought to have found out about this room, so Tev should be safe from outside threats...

Coran didn't want to chance it.

Zuza still seemed troubled, however, and she kept her eyes down as she sat once more beside Coran and followed his directions to get the healing unit situated over his lower back. There were other, lesser pains that may need to be addressed after, but his back was the worst of it. He'd tweaked something when a gladiator threw him against a console on the bridge, and carrying Tev halfway across the castle hadn't helped any.

He lay face down on the cot, letting his body rest for a moment as the healing unit worked. He wasn't planning on sleeping--he needed to determine his next steps--but the battle on New Altea had already wiped him out even before the castle turned against him. Before he knew it, the low light and the steady humming of the healing unit had lulled him to sleep.

* * *

Not everyone was dead.

Mateo hadn't realized that he'd been worried about that until they found the cells. (They hadn't been _looking_ for cells; at least, Mateo didn't think they had been. Maka had just gotten turned around somewhere along the way.)

"Okay, something's definitely different around here," Maka muttered. He glanced over his shoulder at Mateo, who shrugged, and Wyn, who only blinked. Maka had pulled Wyn aside back in Tik’s hidden room. Mateo wasn't sure what exactly he'd said, but Wyn had joined them without a word, and without acknowledging the glare Edi shot Maka's way.

If he really was a technopath like Maka said, then Mateo was glad to have him along. There were enough terrifying things in the castle as it was, and--for one reason or another--they seemed to have better luck avoiding the worst of it with Wyn around. At least... that was what Maka said. Considering this was only the second time Mateo had ventured out, he supposed he was just going to have to take Maka's word for it.

"Different?" Mateo asked. "What do you mean, different?"

Maka waved toward the cells up ahead. "Well, do _you_ remember these things being here? Cause I sure don't."

"Then we must be lost," Mateo said, struggling to stay calm. "Rooms don't just appear and disappear, Maka."

"They do on the castle-ship."

Mateo squinted at him, trying to decide how likely it was that Maka was just messing with him, but at that moment Wyn spoke up for what might well have been the first time since the attack.

"Reconfiguration," he said, voice low.

Maka snapped his fingers. "That's it. Anyway, the paladins have done it before. Not a lot, but sometimes you need new stuff when new people move in." He pursed his lips. "The only question is, how come the Empire knows how to do it?"

Wyn's eyes fluttered closed, and Mateo stepped closer, looking for a good way to offer comfort. Wyn had been skittish all day, and Mateo wasn't sure that a hug would be appreciated--now of all times.

"Do you think we can get them out of there?" Maka asked, completely ignorant of what was going on behind his back. All his attention was on the cells that had apparently been created from thin air in the last twelve hours. (Twelve hours? Mateo hadn’t been paying attention to the clock, but that sounded right. Edi had made them wait out the initial attack, bullying them all into sleeping and then eating before the first trip out to gather information--and it had been hours more since then.)

Mateo didn't have a good view around the corner, but he could hear the prisoners--lots of them. Dozens, at least. No one was talking loud enough for Mateo to hear what they were saying, but all the voices overlapped like crowded school hallways between classes.

Mateo stared at the back of Maka's head. "Get them _out_? You mean, like, break them out of jail?"

"What else would I mean? They're prisoners! We can't just leave them."

"But..." Mateo hesitated, looking to Wyn in the hopes that he would talk sense into Maka so Mateo wouldn't have to. No such luck, of course, so Mateo drew in a deep breath. "Even if we could, where would we take them? _We_ can barely fit in Tik's hideout. We can't fit the entire castle-ship in there with us."

"We could _fight._ " Maka finally pulled his gaze away from the cells, deflating a little as he turned back toward Mateo and Wyn. "Yeah, yeah, I know. We can't take back the ship. Not yet." He bit his lip, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "We'll come back for them."

Mateo nodded. "We will. Right now, we need to find the bridge."

Maka dragged his feet, but he did come, which Mateo honestly found a little surprising. If anyone should be calling the shots here, it should be Maka. Well... maybe Wyn, except that, with as quiet as Wyn had been, Mateo didn't expect him to call much of anything. And Mateo? Mateo was in so far over his head all he could do was pretend he wasn’t drowning.

He should have stayed with Luz.

The thought bounced around in his head as he followed Maka onward. Luz had made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him, but she was still his _sister._ She needed him.

The hallways all looked the same to Mateo, even though he'd spent the last few weeks here. He'd started to build a map in his head, but that map was dependent upon knowing where he was starting from--and on the basic assumption that the building wouldn't rearrange itself from one day to the next. Even Maka seemed to be having trouble figuring out where to go, and he prided himself on knowing everything about the castle-ship. And, sure, Mateo knew not to expect him to know _everything_ \--he didn't know the mechanical stuff like Bee did, and he hadn't known about Tik's hideout--but if Maka couldn't even find his way around, they were all screwed.

They were stopped at a crossroads, Maka completely lost and trying not to show it, when Wyn stepped forward, twisting so he didn't bump either of the others as he slipped between them, and strode off down down the hallway to the left, so confident Mateo didn't even think to stop him.

"Wyn?" Maka hissed, chasing after him. "You know where you're going?"

Wyn didn't answer, and Mateo could only offer Maka a shrug as he looked over for guidance. "We can’t get any _more_ lost."

Maka wrinkled his nose, but relented, and they followed Wyn through eerily silent hallways, up stairwells--always stairs, even when there was an elevator right next to it. Mateo was sure there was a good reason for that, but it just made it feel like it took that much longer, and every second already felt like an eternity. Just because they hadn't already seen any gladiators didn't mean they weren't coming.

But Wyn kept walking, and Mateo and Maka followed, until they came at last to the bridge--to just around the corner from it, where Wyn suddenly stiffed and flattened himself against the wall. His eyes had gone wide, his breathing stopped completely, and Mateo mimicked him without thinking. When Maka moved to peak around the corner, Mateo reached out to grab his arm, but Maka just gave him a pointed look and kept moving. And somehow, Mateo found himself following, ducking down to peek around the corner while Maka loomed over him.

There were at least six or seven gladiator robots in the hallway outside the bridge, all of them standing perfectly still, their eyes glowing red. They each held a sword or staff in a two-handed grip, straight up and down in front of them like suits of armor on display.

Except that Mateo had no doubts these things would kill him in an instant.

He lingered only an moment before backing up, dragging Maka with him. They and Wyn retreated around a few more corners before risking a conversation.

"We need to get inside," Maka said at once, his eyes on the ceiling. "Find out if there are more of those things in there."

" _How?_ " Mateo asked, though he had a feeling he already knew the answer.

Sure enough, Maka pointed at a vent cover across the hall. "Same way we get to and from Tik's place."

He was already moving, confident, like the others had agreed to his plan. Mateo grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. "You barely fit in the vents, Maka. They'll hear you banging around in there from a mile away."

Maka opened his mouth to argue, then shut it just as quickly. "We need to know what's happening. The bridge is our best chance to get out of here."

"I know." Mateo's voice was shaking. His hand, too. He crossed his arms and stared at the vent, breathing a few times before he nodded, more for his own sake than for Maka's. "I'll go. It _has_ to be me," he went on, because Maka was already trying to talk him out of it. "You're too big, and if you stay here, you're going to need Wyn to keep you off the cameras." He shook his head, hoping that it would make him wake up from what had to be a very weird dream. "I'll be quick."

He waited for Maka or Wyn to speak up, to shoot down his plan, to tell him that he'd forgotten about something, and he couldn't go, after all.

Neither of them said a word.

So he started walking, and Maka helped him up to the vent, and then Mateo was alone, more claustrophobic than he'd ever been before but dragging himself through the vents as quietly as he could. He stopped at every opening to look at where he was, afraid he'd get himself lost and never find his way back to his friends. Didn't matter that they were only a few hallways away from the bridge; it felt like the vents were in a dimension of their own. One wrong turn, and he'd end up in the trash compactor or something crazy like that.

He spotted the group of gladiators outside the bridge, and for a second he almost wished he _had_ fallen down the garbage chute. He'd rather deal with that than a horde of angry robots.

He slowed down even more, creeping past the robots inch by inch and wincing every time the metal around him groaned.

After an eternity, he made it, and soft blue light shone up through the next vent ahead of him. Mateo inched up to it, holding his breath, and peered through. At first, the bridge looked empty. There were no hulking gladiator bots standing guard, at least not where Mateo could see. Wasn't any movement, either.

There was blood, though, and a lot of it. Red and purple blood, and a little bit of something that looked like oil. (Mateo didn't hold out much hope for that not being blood, too.) Mateo had to bite his lip to stay silent, and his stomach still turned over. He'd seen a little bit of blood elsewhere in the castle, and he knew Maka had seen some dead bodies the first time he went out, but it was different seeing the evidence for himself.

At least there were no bodies here. Either they'd been dragged somewhere to be out of the way or they'd survived the attack, in which case they were probably all in the cells they'd found earlier. Mateo desperately hoped that was the case.

The light flickered, and Mateo automatically ducked back before remembering he was in the vents, so no one should be able to see him no matter what the lights did.

He forgot to be scared a moment later when he spotted a hologram woman standing at the console. Mateo recognized her as one of the old paladins, and he thought, for a breathless second, that maybe she was sending a distress call on behalf of the castle. Except... something was wrong. She didn't look worried, or rushed, and she didn't look nervous, like she was afraid the invaders might catch her. She just looked frustrated.

And, well, it didn’t make sense, a paladin turning evil… but then again, the castle’s robots turning evil didn’t make much sense, either. What _did_ make sense was one of them causing the other--an evil paladin AI turning the entire castle against them.

* * *

"You're joking."

"I wish," Mateo muttered. “And keep it down.”

Maka shook his head. "One of the _paladins_?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? The old red paladin. That Altean lady."

"Keturah," Wyn offered.

Edi scratched her cheek like she was trying to look thoughtful instead of letting on how scared she was. Mateo had hightailed it back to the hideout as soon as he returned to Maka and Wyn, not even daring to tell them what he'd found out until they were back somewhere safe. Now it was just the four of them--the unofficial war council of this little militia. Bee and Dagmar watched them from a few feet away, clearly trying to figure out what was being said. Tik had vanished somewhere in the vents while Mateo and the others were gone, and Mateo thought they all should have been more worried about that, even if they couldn't stop Tik from doing what he wanted to do.

Mostly, though, Mateo was worried about Luz. She was having a hard enough time with this without realizing how totally screwed they were. She was the real reason he’d pulled the others aside. If Luz couldn’t even handle the idea that she might be in danger, he didn’t want to see how she reacted to finding out the enemy was half-paladin, half-castle.

"So, what?" Edi asked. "You're saying she got corrupted somehow? Someone got to the main computers?"

"That or Keturah betrayed us," Maka said. "Either way, it means the entire castle could be hostile."

"It's going to be hard to send out a distress call, too," Edi pointed out. "Whatever's going on with Keturah, she’s got to be the reason our comms aren’t working. She’s probably blocking transmissions from the bridge and the comms deck, too. We’ll need to find a way to send it off without her noticing."

"We need a distraction is what we need." Maka rubbed his chin, then nodded slowly. After a moment, he tilted his head, not looking at Edi now, but past her, to where the others were talking in hushed voices. Maka grinned. "How much you wanna bet Bee can rig something up for us?"

* * *

Coran probably shouldn't have left the hidden room--not so soon, not while he was still sore from half-healed injuries, and certainly not alone. But Tev would take several hours yet to recover, with or without the healing tech, and Coran didn't dare leave him alone.

So Zuza was watching him, though she'd looked ready to crawl out of her own skin when Coran headed out. He had his spear, he had a pistol, and he had knowledge of the castle to rival Keturah's. More relevant right now, he knew the cameras. After months of checking security feeds to try to figure out who the spy might have been, he was intimately familiar with the areas too thick with cameras to go unseen, as well as those areas where he might slip by if he was careful.

He didn't trust his luck to cross the castle entirely unseen, but that was what the weapons were for.

The first thing to do was get a handle on the situation. At least half a day had passed since Keturah attacked, likely more. The bridge had been taken, and Keturah had control of the castle. In all likelihood, Coran and Zuza were the only people not captured or incapacitated in the fighting. He needed to find a security node where he could check the cameras--and he’d have to be quick about it.

He only hoped this was going to be worth it.

He met little resistance on the way to the security node: a lone patrol here, a small swarm of gladiators there. A quick jolt from the business end of Coran’s spear was enough to knock them out of commission long enough to slip away, so he didn’t linger. It was a long walk to the nearest node, most of it through unnervingly open corridors. Coran flattened himself against walls, closed his eyes and listened for the faint whir of cameras rotating on their mounts. Slow and steady, he told himself. Haste would get him nowhere.

A third patrol found him two corners away from his target. Cursing, Coran extended his spear, spinning into an attack that dropped two of the five before they had time to mount an offensive. The third swung for his head, and he dropped, his knees protesting the motion.

"I'm getting too old for this," he muttered, launching forward and driving the tip of his spear into the gladiator's chest. The last two came at him from either side, swords glinting in the light. Coran leaped, vaulting off the shoulders of the skewered gladiator. He abandoned his spear in favor of his gun, and two clean shots brought down two more gladiators.

The first pair struggled to their feet, but Coran was faster, yanking his spear out of the downed gladiator's chest and beheading the last two in a single swipe. "Guess all that training stuck with me after all." He chuckled as he holstered his gun, collapsed his spear, and sprinted off for the security node. There was no chance Keturah didn't know by now where he was headed, which meant his narrow window was already closing. He only hoped a brief glimpse would show him something useful--like a band of holdouts fighting Keturah off somewhere in the castle, or something in the security system he could exploit to bring Keturah down.

He sealed the door behind him, shoving the hover chair at it just in case a swarm of gladiators tried to bust in. Breathing hard, he leaned his hands on the desk and scanned the screens. What he saw didn't look good--gladiators patrolling the halls, civilians huddled in cramped rooms with more gladiators standing guard outside. Automatic systems going haywire and artificial gravity turned off in some locations.

This was going to be harder than he thought.

Something threw itself against the door, and Coran flinched, clicking through the feeds in search of something, _anything_ he could use. One whole bank of monitors suddenly went dark, and Coran snatched his hand back, cursing. Of course. Keturah didn't need the gladiators to stop Coran. She could interfere far more directly than that.

The middle bank of monitors went dark in the next instant, and Coran reached for his pistol and his spear as the pounding on the door grew louder. The feeds on the last set of monitors changed one last time, and Coran's heart just about stopped. There, visible for a fraction of a second as the feed glitched out, were half a dozen figures down by the armory.

The children.

* * *

Bee did, in fact, have a plan. It wasn't a plan Edi could be truly happy about, but it was the only plan any of them had, and nobody wanted to sit around waiting for someone else to come save them. Edi had to include herself in that count, frankly. She didn't like waiting, _especially_ knowing Keturah had turned against them. And Edi, like it or not, was basically in charge here. Only Maka, Wyn, and Mateo were older, and all of them were... not exactly leadership material.

Plus, Edi was bonded to the Black Lion.

Partially bonded.

 _Fully_ bonded, just not in an official paladin sort of way.

It still meant it was her duty to look out for the others as best she could, and right now that meant getting Bee the explosive charges she needed to finish her bombs.

There was no way this ended well, for any of them.

But they were off--all of them except Tik, who was still out gods-knew-where in the ventilation system, Luz, who refused to listen to any of them when they tried to talk to her about what was happening, and Dagmar, who had agreed to stay behind to watch Luz and to try to get Tik to stay put if he happened to return. Dagmar didn't exactly seem thrilled about being on babysitting duty, but she hadn't been thrilled when she thought she was going out for bomb parts with the rest of them, either.

(She'd flunked out of training for a reason, Edi thought. They all had, just... Some of them found it easier to go back.)

Bee led the way, Wyn crouched low just behind her. He hadn't said anything about blocking the cameras or not, but they weren't attacked within the first two minutes of leaving the vents, so Edi was going to go ahead and assume he was covering them.

She kept her staff at the ready, just in case. Maka had his gun out, too, and he caught Edi's eye as Wyn opened an elevator door, giving them access to a maintenance ladder. Bee and Wyn went first, then Mateo, and Maka lingered with Edi.

"If anything happens, you know it's you and me who are going to have to bail the rest of them out, right?"

Edi pressed her lips together. She'd already had a similar thought--except she hadn't been counting on Maka to help her. Maybe that was unfair of her. However much of an idiot Maka was most of the time, he'd straightened up since the attack. If she didn't know better, she might have even called him responsible.

The two of them were soldiers, more than anyone else. The two of them alone had lasted long enough in training to find out what battle really was.

She shouldn’t have forgotten that.

After a moment she nodded, collapsing her staff and sliding it into her belt as she swung out into the elevator shaft and fitted her toes into the notches of the ladder.

They descended past three doors before Wyn opened another door for them. Edi took up position at the front of their group this time, watching and listening for potential threats and trusting Maka to watch their backs. They were down near some of the specialized training rooms now--ones Edi had seen but never used. They had reinforced walls, built-in particle barriers, and other precautions for when the paladins trained with particularly dangerous weapons.

Bee went straight for the door at the far end of the hall. "How many times have you been down here?" Edi asked, arching an eyebrow.

Bee tilted her head to the side, popping the cover off the lock panel. "A few? I've never taken anything _dangerous_."

"I'm not sure I trust your definition of dangerous," Maka muttered. Edi was glad he'd said it, because that meant she didn't have to.

Bee clicked her tongue and leaned in close to the lock panel, but before she could force it open, Wyn pressed his hand to the wall beside it, and the door slid silently open. Bee stuck her tongue out, but ducked through into the storeroom beyond.

Edi's skin crawled as she followed. "Are you sure you're _allowed_ in here?"

"Ask me again after we've saved the castle," Bee said.

Maka laughed at that, and Edi gave him a disapproving look, but Bee was, unfortunately, right. They needed every advantage right now, and if that meant letting the ten-year-old have the run of a storeroom full of explosives and complicated-looking devices that were probably even more deadly...

Well, that was where they were at right now.

"Just get what you need," Edi said. "We shouldn't stay here any longer than we have to."

Bee touched a finger to her forehead in a salute that looked like she must have picked it up from Maka. Edi pursed her lips, but left Bee to her search and turned to head back toward the door. She might as well keep a lookout, if she wasn't going to be any help with gathering materials.

Halfway back to the door, something in the walls hummed to life. Edi's ears twitched, and she shook her head to dislodge the irritating buzz. In the next instant, she forgot about the sound as a shimmering blue barrier raced out along the walls, closing across the door.

"There's a _particle barrier_ in here?" she hissed, sprinting for the door. She was too late, of course. The particle barrier rippled at her approach, and she rebounded off it with a grunt.

Bee poked her head out from between two racks and gave an apologetic smile. "Um... yeah? Just in case there's a meltdown or something, you know?"

Maka squinted at the barrier as he reached down to help Edi to her feet. "That's not good."

"What isn't?" Mateo asked.

Maka made a face. "We're sealed in. Which probably means Keturah knows we're here."

"What? How? I thought Wyn was keeping us off the cameras."

Edi glanced over at Wyn, who only blinked. "Maybe it wasn't the cameras. Doesn't really matter at this point. Wyn, do you think you could bring this thing down? Bee, get what you need and get ready to go," she added as Wyn joined Edi and Maka by the door. He placed his hand on the barrier and closed his eyes, but the seconds ticked by and nothing happened.

"I don't think it's working," Maka whispered.

Edi shushed him. "Let him focus. Bee?"

"Just found it," she said. "Ten more seconds."

The door hissed open, and Edi breathed out a sigh of relief in the instant before she realized that Wyn still hadn't moved or given any sign that he was the one who had opened the door.

The first gladiator to step through the particle barrier--the blue light rippling across its armor like water--was just the final confirmation that this was Keturah’s doing.

"Enemies!" she shouted, drawing her staff and activating it in a single motion. The end spat a shower of blue sparks as she drove it into the gladiator's chest. More choked the hallway beyond, pressing together as they tried to get through the door.

Bee cursed, skittering out into the open as Maka opened fire over Edi's shoulder at the next gladiator in line.

"Don't let them in here," Bee cried. "If you hit any of these explosives, we're all dead!"

" _Vrekt_ ," Edi muttered. "I'll try to hold them. Maka, take shots where you've got them. Wyn... Try to get that barrier down."

"And fast," Maka added.

Wyn didn't answer, but Edi and Maka had their hands full. Bee and Mateo hovered behind them, Bee clutching a bag full of explosives that could probably take out a whole block of rooms and Mateo holding out his knife like it was going to make all the difference.

Edi fought with everything she had, crushing gladiator skulls and pumping them full of sparks and smacking their swords aside to give Maka a clear shot when she didn't have one.

And it wasn't enough. There were too many of them, and they just kept coming, no matter how many of them Edi took down. They started piling up in the door, but the ones that came behind just grabbed them and flung them back down the hall.

"Wyn!" Maka called, shooting again and again into the crowd. "Any time now would be great!"

But a disturbance at the back of the crowd of gladiators had caught Edi's attention. She blocked a new attack, arms aching, and watching in tired fascination as a cluster of smooth heads simply vanished from the mob.

"Hang on!" Coran's voice rose above the hum of the particle barrier and the ring of metal on metal. "I'm coming!"

"Coran?" Bee asked, relief tangible in her voice.

Edi felt some of that relief, too, but mostly she felt a surge of energy. She'd been approaching collapse, but she fought on, beating down gladiators as Coran cut through them from behind. She could see the sparks his weapon sent out now, the searing blue lines it drew in the air as he swung.

Then, at last, the final gladiator fell, and Coran drove his spear into a panel outside the door. The particle barrier flickered and went out, and Wyn stumbled, breath leaving him in a rush.

"Coran?" he whispered, and then staggered, dropping his head into his hands.

Cursing, Maka caught him, and Coran crossed to his side.

"Wyn?" Maka called, shaking his shoulder. "Are you okay?" He didn't answer, and Maka turned to Coran. "I don't think he's hurt, but he might have overdone it. He's been--"

Maka cut off abruptly, probably realizing the same thing Edi had just realized: if Wyn had overdone it, he might not be able to keep them off the cameras, and that meant they had to be careful about what they said and where they went.

Coran lifted Wyn easily, cradling him against his chest. "What about the rest of you? Are you all all right?"

"Relatively speaking," Edi said. "We shouldn't stay here."

Coran nodded. "My thoughts exactly. Come on. I know somewhere safe."

Edi opened her mouth to argue, to tell him that they already _had_ somewhere safe--then felt suddenly stupid for it. This was _Coran_ , the captain of the Castle of Lions. He wasn't just pretending to be in charge, or taking the lead because there were no better options. He actually knew what he was doing. Who was Edi to think she could do better?

So she fell back, the ache taking over her body, and let Coran lead the way.

* * *

Rowan's head _throbb_ _ed_ _._

The switch had hit him hard, left him disoriented and a little dizzy, but the vertigo passed quickly. He could have walked just fine--and the more he figured out what was happening, the more he felt guilty for making Coran carry him.

But as long as Coran thought he was barely conscious, the longer he had to gather information before he had to pretend to have been here for the last... however long it had been. No one was being considerate enough to lay out a nice, neat timeline for him, but with as bad as things were, he figured it would have shown if it had been more than a day or two.

Something had happened to the castle. The feel of the Quintessence in the walls was wrong, the gladiators from the training deck looked like they'd gone haywire, and everyone-- _everyone_ , even Maka, who never took anything seriously--looked like they wanted to get out of the halls as soon as possible. Everyone had weapons, too. Maka and Bee had _guns_ , and Coran wasn't lecturing them about it or telling them it was too dangerous.

Rowan tried to think back to what had happened before he switched out. They'd been at New Altea, fighting...

Fighting robeasts.

Right. The sight of them all had made Wyn distraught, and Rowan had been trying to calm him at the same time as he was trying not to let on what was going on inside their head. He didn't remember the end of the battle, but _something_ had obviously dragged Leth out. Historically, the list of things that could do that was incredibly short, and usually tied back to Haggar in one way or another.

Coran led them into some kind of back hallway, where the lights were dimmer, the walls and floor bare, and everything just a little quieter. He stuck close to the walls, his head craned back... Watching the ceiling? No, watching for cameras, and trying to stay out of their view.

So it wasn't just the gladiators that had turned against them. Had the castle-ship been captured?

"Coran!"

Rowan looked up as they passed through a door made to look like part of the wall. Zuza was pacing inside the room, worry written in every line of her face. Her eyes widened when she saw the group, and she sat down hard on the edge of a small cot.

"What...?"

"I found them raiding a supply room," Coran said, ushering the rest of them into the room before sealing the door behind him. He settled Rowan on another cot, beside Tev, whose face was pinched with pain. A local healing unit was wrapped around his forehead, glowing a steady blue, and Rowan's heart gave a lurch. "How are you feeling, my boy?"

Rowan sat up, shaking his head. It was still pounding, but other than that he was feeling a little more in control of his body, and if he went on acting like he was hurt or otherwise out of it, people were going to start getting nosy. "I'm fine," he said, trying to make himself sound bright and cheery, like Wyn would do. "Maka was right; I think I just overdid it. I just got a little dizzy, but I'm better now. Sorry to make you worry."

Maka stirred, straightening up and whispering something that sparked a shoving match with Mateo. Maka won, and jogged over to Rowan's side.

"Hey!" he said. "You really are feeling better. He's been real quiet all day," he added, turning toward Coran. "We thought maybe he was sick or something."

Cold spread through Rowan's chest, and he bit his tongue to keep from swearing. Stupid. He should have thought about that. It wasn't _Wyn_ who had shoved him out. It was Leth, and Leth didn't talk much, as far as Rowan could tell. He should have just kept his mouth shut.

But Coran just smiled and smoothed Rowan's hair and told him to rest up--something Rowan was only too happy to do, because it meant he could fade into the background while the others talked. Coran must have only just found Rowan and the others, because he seemed not to know what they'd been up to, and vice versa.

It was one way to get up to date.

There were still pieces missing--Edi mentioned an attack, and Maka claimed that Keturah, of all people, was involved, but otherwise Rowan couldn't figure out exactly what had happened. But he knew that Coran, Zuza, and Tev were the only ones who had escaped the bridge, that Tik had gotten the other kids to some hidden place in the vents, and that Leth had apparently been using his technopathy to keep the other kids off the cameras whenever they went out.

Well, that might explain why his headache was worse than usual.

Bee had disappeared into the vent out in the hall not long after getting to this weird bunker, or whatever it was. She promised to bring Dagmar, Luz, and Tik back with her, but Maka seemed to think she was more interested in getting her bombs--or at least the casing for the explosives she'd left on a table near the door.

While she was gone, the rest of them started to plan.

"We need to send out a distress call," Maka said. "If Keturah really is our enemy, she's probably doing everything she can to make sure the paladins can't find us. But if we can get a distress call off, then they can come, and we can take back the castle."

"That's why we got the explosives, by the way." Mateo looked almost as out of place here as Rowan felt, simultaneously trying to disappear into the corner and fidgeting like he wanted to go out and fight an army of gladiators. "We figured if we set up a distraction somewhere, we might buy ourselves a few minutes to get a message off without Keturah stopping it."

"That's not a bad idea," Coran admitted. "But we'll have to hit the teludav, too. If we don't, even if we get the message off, she'll just open a wormhole and take us away again before the paladins have time to get here."

"We can plant the bombs there!" Maka cried. "Bee can sneak down there through the vents, set the charges, and get out before Keturah has a chance to send anything after her."

"And the rest of us will head for the bridge?” Mateo said, sounding considerably less certain than Maka. “Wyn can keep us off the cameras, so no one will even know we're there."

Rowan blanched, picturing his friends out in the open, completely exposed because they thought he knew how to take control of a security system. "I can't do that!" He snapped his mouth shut at once, stomach curdling as every eye turned his way. "I--I mean... I can't--I--"

"No,” Maka said. “You’re right. You’ve been covering us almost nonstop since the attack. You’ve gotta rest some time. We'll go through the vents, too. In and out in no time."

"We'll have to time it right, though," Edi said. "Send the message right after Bee blows the teludav."

"And I really can't conscience Bee going alone," Coran said. "It's too dangerous."

"I could... I could go with her," Zuza said. "I know I'm not much of a fighter, but--"

Edi was already shaking her head. "It's pretty cramped in the vents. _I_ can barely fit. Anyone bigger than me is just gonna get stuck."

"I'll go," Coran said. "It's been a while since I stretched the old shapeshifting muscles, but I think I remember how it's done."

Edi nodded. "Then we just have to wait for Bee and Dagmar, and then we can head out."

Rowan pulled his legs up on the cot, slowing his breathing and trying not to think about the itch of eyes on the side of his head. He was doing a terrible job of passing right now. He was too shaken, and too much had changed since he'd last fronted, and somehow _Leth_ had managed to go unnoticed, but the switch from Leth-being-Leth to Rowan-trying-to-be-Wyn was just too much. He couldn't keep up. He told himself that it was fine, that no one knew what it meant, but he couldn’t keep his thoughts from spiraling. His head was still pounding, and when he caught Coran watching him, he felt the bottom drop right out of his stomach.

He just hoped Wyn didn’t blame him too much if people started asking questions.

* * *

One hour later, they were in position.

Coran _hoped_ they were all in position. They didn't have working comms, and even if they had, Coran wouldn't have trusted Keturah not to be listening in. He was just going to have to hope that the ventilation system continued to be as discreet as it had been for the kids all day. None of them had run into any trouble so far, and Coran and Bee had made it down to the teludav room without incident.

He still didn't like it. Letting children fight in his stead. Letting them risk themselves. Letting them face Keturah in her element. He'd fought with himself about it, hating the plan every step of the way, searching for some alternative.

If one existed, then he didn't have the time to find it. He was only one man, and these kids were all the help he had. All he could do was pray they made it out in one piece. If anything happened to them, he'd never be able to live with himself.

"Now remember," Coran whispered. "You're going to set the explosives on the conduit line and the regulator-- _not_ inside the lens array."

Bee tipped her head back, and Coran imagined she was barely containing a groan. "I _know_ , Coran. Two small charges, nowhere near the mouth of the teludav itself. We've been _over_ this."

"Good," Coran said. "Because once this is all over, we're going to have to get that teludav back up and running as quickly as possible, and scaultrite isn't easy to come by."

"I _know._ " Bee inched forward, hooking her fingers into the vent cover. "Are we doing this, or not?"

Coran took a deep breath, stretching limbs that weren't sore because of muscle cramps so much as the fact that they were being forced into shapes to which they weren't accustomed. He was ready to be out of this vent and out of this shape, even if he was going to be back in both in just a few moments. He was already dreading it, and he might have maintained his Anuvin shift just to save himself the bother, except that he had no experience fighting with this configuration.

He counted them down, then burst out through the vent an instant before Bee, sprinting straight for the console while she headed for the back wall. He shifted as he ran, shedding his tail and shooting up a solid three feet in height, most of it in his legs. It went against his every instinct to input his credentials--something that would draw Keturah's attention straight to him, if she somehow hadn't noticed him already. But the point of this was to make a ruckus, and trying to remotely access the comms relay on the bridge served the dual purpose of alerting the others that he was in position while also playing into Keturah's expectations. She had to know they would try to get a transmission off, and if she thought they were making the attempt from down here, she wouldn't be focusing so closely on the bridge.

He only hoped it was enough, and he cringed as alarms began to blare. The doors slid open, letting in the first wave of gladiators--just three for now, but there were sure to be more on the way. Coran charged in to meet them, shooting one in the head as he closed the distance, then shifting his focus to melee as his spear extended in his grip.

A click and a beep said Bee had set the first charge. She scuttled to the other side of the room, a blur of motion at the very edge of Coran's vision.

A gladiator swung for Coran's head and he ducked, sweeping its feet out from under it and straightening in the same motion. He continued into a spin, slashing his spearhead across the third gladiator's chest. Sparks snapped in its wake, and Coran kicked the gladiator away, then caught a sword on his spear's shaft.

Another click, another beep, and a moment later a laser flashed past Coran's face to bury itself in the gladiator's eye.

"All set," Bee called. "Let's go!"

Coran didn't waste his breath on a response. He holstered his spear, laced his fingers together, and gave Bee a boost up to the open vent before following. He shifted as he pulled himself into the vent, his bones aching with the transformation, but Bee had set her timers for a scant sixty seconds--any longer, and they risked Keturah recognizing the threat and finding some way to remove or disarm them.

It wasn't very long to get clear of the blast, though, and Coran felt it in his ears when the charges went of. He was glad not to have his Altean hearing at the moment; his Anuvin ears were ringing enough as it was, and Bee doubled over, moaning in pain.

Coran placed a hand on her back, rubbing until she recovered herself, and they hurried onward.

* * *

By the time Edi noticed the change in the pattern of flashing lights on the comms panel, Wyn was already moving. He'd insisted on coming along, even if he wasn't up for more technopathy just yet, and considering he knew the bridge better than any of them, no one could really argue with him.

Edi reacted as soon as Wyn started to move, following him out of the vents and taking up position by the door. They didn't know how long it would be before Keturah noticed them and sent in the gladiators, but it was Edi, Maka, and Dagmar's job to cover Wyn until he had the message away.

Getting the message off, it turned out, wasn't the difficult part. Ten seconds after they dropped down onto the bridge, Wyn let out a soft cry of triumph. "Got it!" he called, and turned away from the console.

There was a scream, echoing as though carried to them on the wind, and the bridge doors burst open, spilling gladiators into the space. Keturah appeared in a blaze of blue light, and Edi screamed, swinging her staff at her before she remembered that it was a hologram, and she couldn't actually hurt it.

It still stung when it passed through her, like a light electric shock, and she shivered, trying to make herself focus on the gladiators as they retreated toward the vent. There weren't that many of the gladiators, compared to the horde they'd faced in the storeroom, but they moved so fast, and so perfectly in sync, that it was all Edi could do to knock their swords away with her staff as Dagmar and Maka did the same on either side. Wyn climbed up into the vents first, leaping from the console up to the grate before contorting himself to lean back up and help Dagmar up beside him.

"You next," Maka said, firing three shots into the advancing line. "I'll hold them off."

Like he was any match for a dozen gladiator. Like _any_ of them were, with an electric charge building in the air, crackling along Edi’s skin like a threat. Edi didn't waste time trying to make him listen, though; she just drove the butt of her staff into his stomach, winding him so he didn't fight her when she grabbed him and tossed him up toward Wyn, who caught him--barely--and dragged him into the vent. Edi followed, skin itching with phantom swords nipping at her heels. Something hot and sharp lanced up into her calf at the last second, and she bit down on a cry of pain as she scurried along the vent, her entire leg throbbing. She tried to get a look at it, to see how bad it was, but the space was too narrow, and that crackle in the air was building again, closing in around them.

There was no time to dawdle, so she gave Wyn a shove to get him moving, and hurried away from the bridge as fast as the cramped space would allow. The light from the bridge pulsed behind her, shadows alive with restless gladiators--but she could almost make herself believe that the frantic flickering was the flashing of an indicator light as their cry for help raced outward across the universe.

With luck, the paladins would receive it before Keturah tracked down the last few holdouts hiding inside the castle's walls.


	3. Successor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Coran, Tev, and Zuza escaped the attack on the bridge and meet up with the kids hiding in the vents. Coran and Bee staged a diversion by disabling the teludav, and Rowan managed to get off a distress call from the bridge. Now they just need to last long enough for the paladins to come save them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: mild unreality to do with illusions, references to past character death, offscreen death of unnamed characters.

Dawn was just breaking over New Alafor when they got the call--not from Olkarion, or from the Accords, but from the Castle of Lions itself. Keith had drifted off against Lance's shoulder despite his resolve to stay awake until they got some news, and he startled awake when the door hissed open. From the way Lance jumped beside him, he'd been dozing, too.

Everyone in the room looked groggy, for that matter, but Keith's head cleared in an instant when he saw Shiro's face.

"We found them."

Lance was on his feet in an instant, dislodging Keith, who was too stunned for a moment to move from the couch. "Are they...?"

Shiro closed his eyes briefly, as though Lance's question had physically hurt him. "We don't have much information, but somebody on the castle-ship broadcast a distress call. That's how we found them. It could be a trap, but it could also mean that at least some of the people who were on board are still in a position to fight back."

"We should hurry." Keith stood, reaching out a hand and cautiously placing it on Lance's shoulder. Lance jumped, then nodded. He turned, crossing to where his parents stood, his mother clutching the collar of her shirt, his father hovering behind her like he was waiting for her to faint.

"I'll bring them home," Lance said, taking both his parents by the arm. "I swear."

Rosario flung her arms around him, pulled him close, and kissed his cheek. "Bring yourself home, too, mijo."

"He will," Keith said, because Lance's smile was too fake to be reassuring. Lance shot Keith an unamused look, and Keith smiled back, punching his arm. He had to force the ease into his motions. After a long, restless night, he was ready to snap, and Lance’s fear for his siblings simmered just below the surface. Keith hated to admit it, but he didn’t trust Lance not to do something stupid to get them back.

It was strange, being the cautious one for a change.

Keith didn't like it.

Lance gave his mother one last kiss, and then they were gone, barely holding back from sprinting all the way to the hangar where the Lions were waiting. Shiro outlined the plan along the way--what little of a plan they had. With no information beyond a set of coordinates, there was going to be a certain amount of improvisation by default.

"We'll go in Yellow, since she has a better cloak than Blue or Black. If we find evidence of a fleet lying in ambush, we might come back for the other Lions, but at this point we're hoping to avoid a large-scale battle."

He didn't have to say that they probably wouldn't survive it. None of them were in any condition for another fight, the Lions least of all. If they'd had the option of forming Voltron, it might be a different story, but Keith wasn't going to argue with a stealth plan today.

"So we go in and retake the castle," Lance said, nodding. "If we're only taking one Lion, I assume we won't have much backup."

"Layeni will be leading a small team of Guardsmen. Only about a dozen, though. Other than that, we’re on our own."

They reached the hangar, and Keith wasn't surprised to find the others already gathered inside. Everyone had been restless after the battle, just waiting on the word to get moving. Lance had said that Meri looked terrible when she returned, and that she'd gone to get some rest, but she didn't look to Keith like someone who'd had anything approaching rest recently. She was stretched thin, wound tighter than anyone else in the room, even Lance and Allura, who both looked ready to take up Yellow’s controls in an effort to reach the castle-ship a little faster. Keith didn't know how much of it was the current crisis and how much was left over from her time as a spy.

Even if Keith had wanted to try to broach the subject with her, however, now wasn't the time. As soon as Lance caught sight of Meri and Allura, he crossed to them and pulled them both into a hug, then nodded at Shiro, who led the way up Yellow's ramp.

They’d barely cleared New Altea’s atmosphere before they opened the wormhole, and the charge in the air intensified when the swirling lights of the wormhole faded.

The castle-ship waited for them just up ahead, still and dark in the middle of empty space. Keith's fur stood on end in anticipation of an attack--it was far too quiet to be trustworthy, especially knowing Haggar was the one behind it all--but nothing moved as Shay eased them closer.

"Where should I go?" Shay asked. "The hangars may be watched."

Shiro leaned a hand on the back of her seat. "Anywhere could be watched. At least if we're in a hangar, it will be easier for us all to get out of Yellow quickly, and to get back in if we're forced to pull out."

Lance shifted, and Keith watched him askance, waiting for him to speak up. He clearly wanted to, and Keith had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say: he wouldn't be pulling out for anything. Not until he had his siblings back safe.

He didn't say anything, though, which only meant that he didn't want the others to put themselves in danger on his account. Keith breathed out, fighting his own urge to speak up, and silently resolved to stick close to Lance through it all.

"BLIP-tech's acting up," Hunk said, tapping the screen before him. "Either Haggar's deliberately messing with us or something about the way she took over the castle is giving these readings, but either way I'm not sure how much we can trust them." He glanced over his shoulder, then enlarged the image for the rest of them to see.

It was odd, Keith had to admit. More like looking at a Balmera than a ship, with more Quintessence in the walls than there should have been and pools of it that ebbed and flowed seemingly at random. The most consistent hotspots were on the bridge, at the heart of the residential floors of the central structure, and near the engines.

Hunk was right; they couldn't trust it--but they didn't have any other leads.

"We need to get to the bridge anyway," Allura said, stepping up beside Shiro. "Even if Coran and his crew aren't there any longer, it's going to be the best place to combat Keturah. Meri and I will go."

"And I don't like the look of the engines," Hunk said. "If that’s not a trick, if she really is flooding them like this, it could tear the ship apart."

"And we'll want to keep her from running again, anyway." Shiro nodded. "I'll go with the two of you. Lance, take Keith and Nyma and check out the residential floors. The civilians were all gathered here when the battle started." He pointed to a spot on the schematics, and Lance nodded. "Layeni, have your people fan out. Start on the lowest floor and make your way up. If you find anything, let us know and we'll come help you out."

"Most importantly, everyone stay alert." Allura stared at the castle as it loomed larger and larger ahead of them. "There's no telling how much of the castle is under Keturah's control by now. Assume everything is hostile, and don't let her corner you."

Keith's heart began to pound at her words--assume _everything_ is hostile. _Everything_ \--the castle itself, weaponized against them.

He didn't have long to contemplate what that might look like; Shay approached Yellow's hangar, and the doors opened to admit them, just as though nothing were wrong. They landed, and the silence descended all around.

No one said a word as they got moving, filing out of the Lion and gathering in their respective groups to head out.

They didn't even make it to the doors before the gladiators began pouring in.

* * *

Even from inside the bunker, Maka knew that something had changed. It was a momentary stutter in the background noise of the castle, the way Wyn tensed and suddenly lifted his head. It was the way Coran's hand went to the spear leaning against the wall just beside him.

It was the alarms that began to blare--distant, yes, but loud enough to hear through the walls.

"What is that?" Dagmar asked, her voice pinched with worry. "What's happening?"

"That's an emergency alert," Coran said, his eyes distant. Maka wondered if he'd forgotten who he was talking to, because he didn't think he meant to sound so grave. "The castle's on lock-down."

Edi's eyes went wide. "Lock-down? Do you... Do you think she knows where we are?"

Coran blinked, ripping his eyes away from the door and reaching out to pat Edi's shoulder. "Don't worry, my girl. We're quite safe here."

They were trapped, Maka thought. But, sure, they were trapped somewhere relatively safe. It seemed to calm Dagmar a little, though she was still clutching her staff like the gladiators might burst in through the door at any moment.

"They're here."

Heads swiveled toward Luz, who was still off in her own little world in the corner of the room, where she'd been ignoring everyone else ever since Coran brought them here. She was standing now, though, staring at the ceiling like she could see through the metal.

Mateo frowned. "What? Who's here?"

She looked at him, a smile breaking across her face. "Lance! And the rest of the paladins. The Empire's trying to keep them out, but..."

She didn't finish the thought, opting instead to head for the door. Coran, Zuza, and Edi all moved to stop her, but Mateo was faster, grabbing her arm and wrestling her back into the center of the room.

"Where do you think _you're_ going? It's dangerous out there, Luz."

She planted her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. "It’s dangerous _everywhere_. If we can find Lance, we’ll be okay."

Maka was pretty sure it was only going to be _more_ dangerous wherever the paladins were, assuming they were here at all. He wanted Luz to be right, of course, and it was easy to believe her. Nothing like the paladins busting in to make Keturah panic. But just because it made sense didn't mean it was true, and Maka was way too tired to get his hopes up _now._

Mateo rolled his eyes and pushed Luz back toward the corner of the room where she'd been busy reading or playing a game or something on the tablet Coran had given her. "Just--go sit down while we figure it out."

Luz's eyes flashed, and she smacked Mateo's hand until he stopped pushing her. "I'm not a little kid, you know. I can help."

"You can _help_ by staying out of the way."

"How come you get to go out and do things?"

"Because I'm older, Luz, okay?" Mateo grabbed her arm and started leading her back to the corner, but she shook him off.

"By two years. Mom and Dad wouldn't let you have that knife if they were here, and you know it."

"Mom and Dad aren't here," Mateo snapped, his voice rising to a volume that made Luz flinch. Mateo ran a hand through his hair, turning a circle in the middle of the room and stopping with his back to Luz as he blinked furiously. "This isn't a _game,_ Luz. Do you understand that? Mom and Dad aren't here. Lance isn't here. That means _I've_ got to keep you safe. So can you just-- _please_ , take this seriously for once."

For a moment, Luz was quiet, her face scrunching up like she couldn't decide if she wanted to cry or to yell. "But Lance _is_ here."

Mateo spun around. "No, he's _not_! I know you want everything to be okay, but it _isn't_. Don't you get it? It's just us, and if the gladiators find us, we're all going to end up dead. So just go back to reading your book or whatever and let us handle it."

Luz ducked her head, but she couldn’t smother the sniffles that overtook her. Mateo’s expression softened, and he stepped forward, reaching out to put a hand on his sister’s shoulder, but she jerked back, slapping his hand away. “He _is_ here. I _know_ he is.”

“Luz--”

But Luz was already moving, shoving Mateo with both hands so he stumbled, leaving her a clear path to the door. She took it, moving too fast for the rest of them to react. In an instant, she’d disappeared, leaving Mateo to gape at the open door.

“Luz!” he cried, as the door began to shut. He lurched to his feet and stumbled after her.

Edi grabbed his arm before he could go anywhere. "Stop!" she cried, and dug in her heels as Mateo tried to break away. "Coran--!"

Coran was already moving, his spear in hand. "Listen to Edi, my boy. I'll go after her. You stay right here."

He was gone before anyone else could say a word.

* * *

Lance had forgotten how to breathe. Even as he tore through gladiators, breaking through to the wide-open corridor beyond, he felt as though Keturah herself had reached inside his chest and ripped out his lungs. His siblings were in here, somewhere. Coran was in here. Dozens of civilians-- _kids_ \--were in here.

Shiro beheaded the last of the gladiators, then scanned the hallway for more threats. "Go," he said. "And keep your eyes open. Keturah knows we're here; she's going to throw everything she has at us."

Lance was already moving, Keith and Nyma close on his heels. It felt strange to be so wary inside the castle's walls. This ship had been home for so long, and Lance knew these twists and turns so well, that it felt like a bad dream. He shouldn't have to worry about what new trap was waiting for him with every step.

And there were traps. Gladiators patrolled the hall with staves and swords, and they didn't hesitate to go for the kill. Alarms blared, lights going dark and flashing on at random intervals. They'd all already sealed their helmets, trusting to their infrared mode, but even that was hazy now. The temperature was fluctuating even as Lance watched, Q-conduit in the walls radiating heat as Keturah overloaded them, icy air blasting through the vents. The paladin armor kept him from feeling either extreme, but the civilians wouldn't have that, and his visor was a kaleidoscope of hot and cold spots that made it difficult to distinguish an advancing gladiator from the castle going haywire.

If that was the worst of it, Lance wouldn't have complained. But these hallways weren't the same as the ones Lance remembered. They curved away from the heart of the castle, leading Lance and the others out to god only knew where. Every door they tried was locked, and, sure, Keith sliced through a few locks, but they were just as likely to find a blank wall behind any given door as a room, much less a way towards anywhere they wanted to go.

Ten minutes into their infiltration, they found themselves back outside the Yellow Lion's hangar, surrounded by crushed and sparking gladiators.

"Fuck it," Lance muttered, trading out his bayard's rifle form for the grenade launcher. "I'm gonna blast a hole in the wall. Take cover."

"Lance--"

Keith didn't have time to say more. Lance fired a grenade, then turned and dragged Keith into the hangar, taking cover against the wall. Nyma had already flattened herself against the wall on the other side of the door, and she glared at Lance as the explosion thundered through them.

"You really think this is the best plan?" Nyma asked.

"Better than wandering through Keturah's maze while she toys with us."

"So, what? We're just gonna blast our way through the entire castle?" Nyma crossed her arms. " _That's_ efficient."

Lance only shook his head. "She can't have reconfigured everything. Do you know how much Quintessence that would take? Or how long? She probably hit a couple of areas she expected us to try to go, just to slow us down. If we can get past that, we'll be in the clear."

Nyma's mouth was open like she wanted to argue with that but didn't know how, and Keith just shrugged and gestured for Lance to continue, which he did gladly. It was a tedious process, setting each charge, retreating to cover, detonating, then creeping through the smoke and rubble into a new room or hallway, each as unfamiliar as the last.

He repeated the cycle as many times as he could bear, until the next door didn't open onto a blank wall or an empty room--really _empty,_ empty like it had been freshly reconfigured and no one had bothered to put sheets on the bed or supplies on the shelves.

So when he found an ordinary-looking bedroom--a little musty-smelling, and clearly unused, but fully furnished and remarkably mundane--he breathed a sigh of relief.

"All right," he said, backing out into the hall and glancing both ways. "Now to figure out where we are."

"All that Quintessence in the walls is messing with the map," Nyma said, hitting her gauntlet like that might make the shaky holographic map resolve into something a little more readable. "Maybe that way?" She pointed to the right, and Lance took two steps in that direction before a whisper had him whipping around.

"Did you hear that?"

Nyma gave him a strange look. "Hear what?"

Lance hesitated, searching the empty hallway for signs of movement. Maybe he was going crazy--or his desperation to find Luz and Mateo was messing with his head. He could have sworn it was Luz's voice he heard in the distance, frantic and hushed.

"I heard it too," Keith said, shifting so he stood a little closer to Lance. "Voices. They were coming from this way."

Nyma looked skeptical, and she raised her rifle as they followed the voices to the next cross-corridor, where Lance stopped again, waiting and listening for proof that they really had heard someone.

This time, it was a flicker of motion that caught his attention--a small figure darting out of a doorway some distance down the hallway to the right. Lance spun, and his heart leaped right into his throat, leaving him breathless as he mouthed Luz's name.

It _was_ Luz; there was no doubting that. She was hunched over, her hair a wild nest around her head, but she was wearing her favorite jacket, and as she turned to peer around a corner, Lance caught a glimpse of her face in profile.

She disappeared around the corner before Lance found his voice, and he chased after her, his heart fluttering at a frantic pace. "Luz." Her name came out as a wheeze, hardly loud enough for him to hear. He tried again, tripping over his own feet as he raced after her. "Luz!"

He rounded the corner and there she was, frozen in the middle of the hallway. She had her back to him, but she must have heard his call. She'd stopped, shaking, and slowly turned toward him. "Lance?"

Lance's vision blurred. "Luz. Thank god you're safe."

He didn't slow, careening down the hallway toward her as she shook her head in disbelief and broke into a sprint, her head down as she raced toward him, her footsteps ringing loud in the air. She choked on a sob, and Lance ran harder, ready to catch her and squeeze her so tight she forgot any of this had ever happened.

Lance was hardly two steps from Luz when Keith grabbed his wrist in a vicelike grip, yanking him backward. Lance opened his mouth to demand to know what he was thinking, but Keith wasn't done. He hooked his foot around Lance's ankle, sending him crashing ungracefully to the floor. He rolled, head spinning, and his breath caught as a flash lit up the hallway.

"Wait!" he cried, spinning back toward Keith and Luz, hand outstretched. He couldn't stop it, though; Keith had summoned his shield and drawn his sword, and he twisted to put the shield between him and Luz. Lance could only watch in horror as she slammed into it with enough force to drive Keith back a step. "Keith, what the hell--?"

The words died on Lance's tongue as Luz's image flickered, stabilizing again for an instant before Keith pivoted and thrust forward with his sword, splitting the air just above her head.

The image shattered in a shower of blue particles, Luz disappearing in an instant and leaving a gladiator in her place, Keith's sword embedded in its throat. Lance felt as though his entire body had just been doused in ice water, and he shook his head, blinking furiously as his eyes struggled to focus on the scene before him. "What...?"

"Holograms," Nyma muttered, stepping up beside him. She held her gun at the ready, looking around for more threats, but once Keith pulled his sword free and swung it again, beheading the gladiator, the corridor was silent. Nyma waited a heartbeat longer, then slung her rifle over her shoulder and helped Lance to his feet. "We can't trust anything."

Lance stared at the gladiator, swallowing around the lump in his throat before he worked up the courage to meet Keith's eye. "Thanks for that."

"Don't mention it."

"How'd you know it wasn't Luz?"

"Her footsteps were too heavy." Keith deactivated his blade and returned the hilt to its spot on his belt. "A hologram can't mask sounds."

Lance nodded, a little robotic, and reached for the comms controls on the side of his helmet. He could have activated them with a thought, but he needed something to do with his hands right now, and double-checking that the call was routed through the Yellow Lion--their best bet to shield the call from Haggar, according to Hunk--helped calm his nerves. "Guys?" he called, hoping his voice wasn't shaking as much as it seemed to him. "Just a heads up, Haggar's using the hologram projector to create illusions. Almost just got skewered by a gladiator that looked like my sister."

Hunk's muttered curse drew a shaky laugh out of Lance--if he was swearing, then it means Lance wasn't overreacting. Things just were that bad.

"Thanks for the warning," Shiro said. "We're almost to the engine room. Give you an update when we can."

"Same here," Meri added. "We ran into a little trouble, but we're almost to the bridge."

Lance nodded, responding with a grunt, then turned back to Keith and Nyma. "Okay, so... Let's keep moving. Keith, your hearing is about a hundred times better than mine, so let me  know if anything doesn't sound right."

Keith nodded, and they set out once more. It was several minutes before Lance's hands stopped shaking.

* * *

Mateo knew the instant Coran returned that Luz was gone. She'd had too much of a head start, and was too quick, and Coran had to be careful not to get himself caught. Mateo _knew_ that, just like he _knew_ he should have been the one to go after her.

"We'll find her, Mateo," Coran said, taking him by the shoulders. "I swear it."

" _How?_ "

"There's a security station two floors up. If we can get there unseen, we'll have a comprehensive view of the castle. We can find out where your sister has gone. It'll be faster than searching blind."

It would be. That didn't mean Mateo liked the plan, especially once it became clear that Coran wasn't going to take him. _We'll need to use the vents,_ he'd explained, his body shrinking even as he spoke, folding in on itself, his skin growing rough and thick, his hair hardening into something like Shay's carapace. Wyn mimicked him a moment later, and Coran nodded to him. The two of them were smaller than anyone else except Tik--so of course _he_ got to go. He knew the vent system better than anyone, which meant Coran trusted him to navigate.

Fine. Mateo didn't say a word as they disappeared into the vent across the hall from Coran's secret bunker. He kept quiet as Zuza and Edi tried to take charge of the rest of them, Edi trying to bully them all into behaving, Zuza pretending like everything was just fine and dandy and they _weren'_ _t_ all likely to wind up dead by the end of the day.

Mateo kept quiet through all of it, and then, when Tev--awake at last, if groggy--finally suggested they find something that could pass for dinner as a way to change the topic, Mateo opened the door and slipped out into the dark, noisy hallway.

He wasn't going to wait for Coran when Luz could be in danger right this second. He had to find her, and soon. Without Lance or his parents here, keeping her safe was Mateo's job.

He wasn't going to screw it up.

* * *

There were bodies in the halls. Some Meri recognized, many she didn't. She searched every face, dreading the moment she found Coran, or one of the kids. Her heart rode high in her throat, and every step made her queasy. She'd thought her time on the _Eryth_ had been unbearable, but at least there it was only innocent strangers and her own conscience at risk. This was so much more personal, and she kept closing her eyes, hoping if she could only find the weakness in Keturah's magic, she would wake from this illusion.

Nothing felt real. Nothing had for several days now--not when she’d heard of the attack on New Altea, not when she learned the truth about Keturah, not the long, quiet flight home or the few hours of exhausted haze in Allura's bed before they got the call.

Not when Allura finally had a chance to tell her what had happened. The castle gone, Coran, Wyn, and the youngest Mendoza kids along with it. Meri hadn't seen Rosario since her return. She told herself it was the urgency of their mission, but the truth was she was scared. Scared to let her best friend see what she'd become. Scared to have to say she didn't know if Luz or Mateo were okay. At least if she found them first, she could soothe Rosa's fears.

She had to survive, first.

Meri had spent long enough in close proximity to Haggar--to Keturah first, but lately to the _thing_ she had become--to recognize her presence in the air. She didn't think it had been there before she left to spy; Meri likely wouldn't have recognized it anyway, but she doubted it had been so powerful, so pervasive. Keturah had wanted to go unnoticed, and so she had.

She wasn't trying to hide herself any longer. Her Quintessence flooded the castle--not quite the oily, invasive Quintessence that steeped the _Eryth_ , not quite that far gone--but Meri recognized it all the same. It was in the climate control system that monitored and regulated the temperature and humidity, turning the castle hot and humid one moment, frigid and dry the next. It was in the water pipes and power grids, which hummed loud enough to fill Meri's ears with threats of burst pipes and power surges. It was in every benign machine that lined the halls or lurked behind closed doors--food dispensers, laundry systems, the hydraulic network that delivered armor and weapons across the castle as needed, even the PA system.

Even the Quintessence grid wasn't immune to Keturah's control. The ambient levels were dangerously low--not deadly, not yet, and especially not with so few people on the castle. But either the crystal had been damaged or Keturah was throttling the life support systems--and why? To remind the paladins she could kill her hostages anywhere, at any time? Why hadn’t she killed them all already?

"She's reconfigured this floor, too," Allura whispered, her staff held back and ready to swing into action. Meri nodded, her eyes straying to the hall behind them. They'd encountered no major threats on their way to the bridge except the new labyrinth that blocked their way. Meri had wondered whether she'd really been gone so long as to forget the way to the bridge, but Allura was just as lost.

"She's toying with us," Meri said. "She does this."

Allura gave her a look, which Meri pointedly ignored. It was the truth, after all. There had been the gladiators in the hangar, easily dispatched by eight paladins, and then... nothing. Nothing the paladin armor couldn't easily protect against, which Keturah would _know_.

She wanted them to reach the bridge. Oh, she might delay them a bit. Work them up on the way there. But she didn't want to stop them. Meri didn't know _why_ , but it didn't much matter. Coran had been on the bridge when Keturah took the castle. Even if he wasn't there any longer, it was still their best chance to find a clue as to what might have happened to him.

Meri could hardly breathe for fear of what she would find. But she pressed on anyway, because Coran mattered more than her own safety, and she would gladly walk into an ambush for a chance to get him back.

When at last the doors to the bridge came into view, Meri traded a look with Allura and knew at once that they were on the same page. Allura flipped her staff up into a ready position. Meri dropped her hand to the pistol on her hip.

They strode in together, and Meri had just enough time to process the blood on the wall, on the floors--blood, but no bodies she could see from here--before the door slammed shut behind her and half a dozen gladiators stepped out from the shadows.

* * *

"Can you see 'em?"

Coran reached back, placing a hand on Tik's shoulder to quiet him. Maybe it was the fact that Coran was still in an Arusian shift, his body already aching again. Maybe it was just the situation making Tik bolder and more curious than usual.

Whatever the case, it was impossible to keep him from pressing forward toward the vent beside Coran, peering down into the security booth, where dozens of screens flipped through feeds from every camera in the castle. Coran had feared Keturah may have turned them all off after his visit to the last node, but she apparently had more pressing things on her mind. Wyn hung back, as silent as ever, yielding his position to Tik without protest. Coran might have commented on that, except that he was too busy trying to keep Tik from giving away their presence.

"Give me a moment," Coran said, pressing down on Tik's back. He didn't think the boy would _actually_ launch himself out of the vents, but it wasn't a risk he was willing to take.

Satisfied that Tik would remain where he was--or at least that Coran would have warning before he did something inadvisable--Coran turned his attention to the screens. Most of the scenes visible there were uninteresting--empty rooms and halls, as quiet as when Coran had first arrived on Arus, alone, and had gone to put himself in stasis. Here and there he spotted gladiators patrolling the halls, or civilians huddled in new or makeshift prisons.

One of the screens changed, from one angle down a corridor to a view in the opposite direction. A flash of motion at the edge of the screen caught Coran's eye, and he looked quickly to the next screen over, holding his breath until the feed changed to a different angle--and showed three figures in paladin armor. The image wasn't the best quality, especially viewed from the other side of vent cover, but judging by their size and weapons, Coran identified them as Lance, Nyma, and Keith.

Coran breathed out, feeling rather as though he'd just been punched in the gut. His shift shivered, and he closed his eyes, focusing on keeping his form under control, and not on the fact that the paladins really had come. They had a fighting chance.

Tik, however, had already spotted them, and he turned himself around, kicking Coran in the side in the process, and went to shake Wyn. "They're here," he hissed. "Come look!"

Coran opened his eyes once more as Tik attempted to drag a rather reluctant Wyn toward the grate. Their hushed argument quickly faded from Coran's attention as his gaze lit on another screen: the engine room--except the engine was glowing so bright it flared across the entire screen, nearly whiting out the feed. It pulsed occasionally, warping at the edges, drawing in dark shadows from the corners of the screen.

His heart sank, and he instantly turned to draw Tik's attention, hoping he might have found a shortcut to the engine room in all his explorations. They didn't have any time to waste.

* * *

Hunk was pretty sure Shiro had chosen the engine room as their target because so much of the castle's crew would have been stationed in or around it during the battle. They'd come hoping to find their friends, or at least evidence of what had happened to them after Keturah took over.

There may well have still been people around, though Hunk doubted it. If they were here, they would have noticed the engine overloading as quickly as Hunk did, and they all would have come running to try to stop it from destroying the entire castle.

(Hunk wished he was exaggerating when he thought that, but when you could _see_ the glow of the engine from two hallways away, you knew you had a problem.)

"This is bad," Hunk muttered. "Ohh, this is bad."

"Can you fix it?" Shiro asked.

Hunk gave the engine core a dubious look. They'd stopped in the doorway, helmets sealed to ward off the heat and light streaming off the engine. The engine was Quintessence-based, and none of them had been part of Project Balmera, so it probably didn't pose any real threat, but Hunk didn't want to take any risks. He didn't think anyone did, not as long as Keturah was running the show.

So he could _probably_ get close to the engine without dying. Did that mean he could _do_ anything about it?

"I guess we'll find out." Hunk darkened his visor a little more and started forward. The overwhelming Quintessence in the air made it feel like he was moving through molasses, each step a fight not to be crushed or shoved back. "Shay, I'll need you to lower me into the engine well. Shiro--"

A laser flashed past, oddly muted against the glow of the engine. Hunk spun, his heart dropping as he spotted more gladiators at the doors.

Shiro locked eyes with him. "I'll hold them off," he said. "You two worry about the engine."

Right, because Hunk wouldn't worry about Shiro going up against a bunch of gladiators alone. Not that Shiro couldn't hold his own in a fight, but just because the first bunch had been pushovers didn’t mean they all would be, and if Haggar had decided to set these ones to the highest setting, then even Shiro would balk at taking two on at once--much less half a dozen.

But what else was he supposed to do? If Hunk didn't find a way to shut this engine down, then they were all dead. Heart fluttering in his chest, Hunk turned back to his task. He grabbed the harness stored in a cabinet near the engine well and put it on. He usually did these repairs with Coran, but Shay had helped once or twice--enough to know basically how to run the winch system that would get Hunk close to the engine.

It wasn't until he was standing on the other side of the railing, ready to dive into the well, that Hunk really processed what he was about to do. He'd never worked on the engine while it was running; Coran had made it perfectly clear how dangerous that was. But it wasn't like he could just push a button and shut it down.

"I'm gonna die," he muttered, and then stepped off the catwalk and plunged into the swirling mass of Quintessence.

* * *

Mateo was gone.

Zuza had turned her back for two minutes, trying to keep Bee from arming a new set of explosives that could go off accidentally and get them all _killed_ , and apparently Mateo had taken her inattention as an okay for him to run off alone. That was just great. She was a fantastic babysitter, oh, yes. Coran would really be proud of her when he got back.

"Tev, you're in charge," Zuza said, pointing at him with a stern frown. She tried not to think about the fact that she hadn't even been able to keep tab on the kids, and Tev, who was still injured and a little distracted for it, probably wasn't going to fare well. Zuza hesitated, then turned her best glower on the kids who were still here. Edi and Dagmar she trusted to be at least somewhat responsible, and Bee was too caught up in her own projects to wander off, but Maka? "Stay here," she said firmly. "I'll be back."

She hadn't even made it to the door before Edi and Maka where both on top of her.

"I'm coming, too," Maka said. Zuza opened her mouth to reprimand him, mostly out of gut instinct, but his level gaze and the hand that dropped to his pistol gave her pause. These kids had been through the same training Zuza had--and more recently, to boot. Edi had even kept it up since coming to the castle, which was honestly more than Zuza could say.

"It's dangerous out there," Edi said, like she knew what Zuza was thinking. "We won't have Wyn with us, which means we're probably going to run into trouble. You shouldn't go out alone." She was favoring one leg--had been since she returned from the bridge, though she'd done her best to hide it. But the stubborn set of her jaw said she wasn't going to let the pain stop her.

Zuza shot a helpless look to Tev, but the horrible truth was Edi was right. Zuza had a staff from this room's small arsenal, but she didn't think for one second she could stand up to a swarm of gladiators on her own. Which meant there was no way she'd be able to bring Mateo back in one piece.

As much as she hated it, she might need Edi and Maka's help.

"Fine," she said. "But stay close, and if I tell you to hide, or to turn around and come back here, you don't argue. Deal?"

"Deal," Maka said, and Zuza honestly didn't think she'd ever seen him so serious.

She didn't like it. Yes, Maka could be a pain sometimes. He was a troublemaker, a brat. He didn't listen. But he was _thirteen_. He was _supposed_ to be a little bit of a brat every now and then. He was _supposed_ to have fun and not take anything too seriously.

He wasn't supposed to make such a good soldier.

They set out at once, and Zuza tried not to feel too guilty about taking Edi and Maka out with her. Coran himself had said they didn't have a choice (only after pulling her aside so the kids couldn’t hear, of course); neither of them alone stood a chance, and they didn't have any help _except_ from the kids. Would it have been better to tell the kids they couldn't even help keep themselves alive? They couldn't try to bring their friend back?

Trouble started almost as soon as they left the hidden chamber. It was a prickle along the back of Zuza's neck at first, just the sense that she was being watched, but by the time they reached the first cross-corridor and had to decide which way to go from here, it was more than that. The temperature began to climb, and climb, and climb. Within moments, Zuza was feeling it, and she didn't have Edi or Maka's thick fur. Both of them were panting, their eyes glazed, and Zuza almost turned around right there.

But her eyes were having trouble focusing, and she wasn't sure if it was the heat, or the flickering lights, or if there was something else that was making her so light-headed. She wanted to find somewhere dark to curl up and sleep for a year, but she would have settled for dropping where she stood. She was just so _tired_ , and she didn't understand how she hadn't noticed the exhaustion sneaking up on her.

Edi and Maka were still ahead of her, still trudging onward, though Edi's limp was more pronounced and Maka kept having to put a hand on the wall to steady himself. Each time he did, he snatched it back at once, hissing in pain. The heat, probably. Zuza wasn't inclined to test that theory for herself.

She also wasn't very inclined to try to convince Edi and Maka to turn around. They wouldn't go willingly, and she really didn't want to get into an argument out here in the open, and they hadn't found Mateo _or_  Luz, so what was she supposed to do? Just give up? Let the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds handle things?

Not a chance.

It was _unfairly_ hot, though.

"Wait." Edi stopped in the middle of the hall, her ears pricking up and her eyes losing some of their glassiness as she turned a slow circle, gaze roving the empty corridor. "What's that?"

Zuza was about to ask what she was talking about when Maka straightened up beside her, drawing in a sharp breath. "Mateo?"

Zuza frowned. "What about Mateo?"

But Maka wasn't paying any attention to Zuza. He hesitated, scanning the hallway as Edi had done before cautiously starting off in a seemingly random direction--towards a spot on the wall a few dozen feet away. It was as unremarkable as the rest of the hallway, but Edi jogged after him, and Zuza followed along, curious if a little skeptical.

As she approached, she finally heard it: breathing. Faint, quick breathing, a little pained. She wouldn't have pegged it as Mateo, but Maka did know him better than Zuza, so maybe...

Except the hallway was still clearly empty.

"What, is the castle haunted now?" Zuza muttered.

A sudden _clang_ split the hush, and Zuza nearly jumped out of her skin, doubly so when Maka fell against the wall clutching his foot. " _Vrekt_ ," he hissed. "What the _tchuss_  was that?"

"A drone?" Edi crouched down, reaching out to poke... something. It flickered and shifted even as Zuza squinted, trying to focus on it. There was nothing there, and then there was a little round drone there, sparking and battered, but it wasn't until Edi extended one end of her staff and drove the sparking tip into the drone's body that the illusion finally dropped.

It _was_ a drone, one Zuza had occasionally seen in Guard training exercises. It was basically just for target practice, though it did have a camera and a holographic projector, probably for advanced drills. There was a knife sticking out of the projector just now, precariously wedged an inch deep into the metal. The drone's dying spasms were enough to dislodge it, and it made a little clatter as it hit the floor.

Zuza didn't care much about the drone, though, because Mateo sat slumped against the wall nearby, his eyes closed, a visible sheen of sweat on his skin. For a heart-stopping second, she thought he was dead, but his chest rose and fell in quick, deep breaths, and he stirred as Maka dropped to the floor beside him and grabbed his shoulder.

Mateo's eyes cracked open, and he frowned. "Maka? What're you doing here?"

"Looking for you, idiot," Maka snapped. "Are you hurt?"

Mateo shook his head after a moment's delay. "'m fine. Tired. It's hot."

 _Too hot_ , Zuza thought, a little distracted. It was hard to focus, but seeing Mateo like this, she knew that things were worse than any of them had expected. "You're right," she said, shaking herself and picking Mateo up. He squirmed, but only a little, which was fortunate. He might have been two or three feet shorter than Zuza, but he was gangly like his brother, and she didn't want to have to deal with flailing elbows. "It's not safe for you three."

Edi's head snapped up, and Maka opened his mouth to argue, but Zuza mustered what she hoped was a stern glare for both of them.

"You promised me you'd go back if I told you to, didn't you?" She marched them back up the corridor, shocked by just how much cooler it was even two cross-halls away. She stood a little taller here, and Mateo became lucid enough that Zuza put him down, letting Maka take over fussing over him.

"But... Luz," Mateo said, swaying where he stood.

" _I'll_  find Luz," Zuza said, and maybe it was heat sickness giving her false bravado, but she didn't even hesitate when she said it. "I can tolerate this heat better than any of you."

Edi crossed her arms. "Oh, really?"

"Really," Zuza said, grinning as she ruffled Edi's hair. " _I_ haven't got those cold-weather hides, have I? And any Galra is better adapted to the heat than humans," she added, pinning Mateo with a frown. He looked too tired to argue, which was good, because Zuza had no clue if what she'd just said was true. Akira liked to play up all the weird shit humans could survive, and it was hard to tell how much of it was true. Maybe humans _were_ better adapted to the heat than Galra. Maybe not.

 _Mateo_ couldn't stand much more of this heat, though, and Edi and Maka's thick fur would have them in a similar state soon enough. Of that much, Zuza was certain.

"Go back to the room," she said, ignoring the itch down the back of her neck that said she shouldn't be sending them away. "You'll be safe there... Have Tev find you some water. You all need it."

None of them looked happy about it, but Edi seemed determined to uphold her promise, and she got the other two moving, though she kept shooting glances behind her as they walked away.

Then it was just Zuza, staring down a blazing hot, conspicuously empty corridor.

They must have been on the right track. The heat, and the holograms put up to make hallways look empty even when they weren't--it all had to be here for a _reason_. There was something down this way that Keturah didn't want them to find.

Zuza was just going to have to out-stubborn her, then.

* * *

Coran knew at once they'd found the engine room. The light blazing up through the vent up ahead couldn't be mistaken for anything else. He'd hoped the cameras had simply been overwhelmed by the glow of Quintessence, that it wasn't as bad as it looked--even the best recordings were notoriously sensitive to Quintessence, after all. But this? This was bad.

He stopped a hundred feet away from the vent, reaching back for Wyn and Tik. "Stay here," he said.

"But--"

Coran put his hand on Tik's head to quiet him. "It's dangerous in there, even if we get lucky and no gladiators show up." Which he wasn't counting on, for the record. Keturah might not be able to see what was happening in the engine room, what with how the energy surge didn't play well with the cameras, but she would know if he managed to make any real progress. Coran wasn't going to take the children into that.

"I could..." Wyn hesitated, but his eyes were steady when Coran turned his way. "I could help."

Coran smiled. "I know you could, but it's not worth the risk. Stay here. Look out for Tik. Head back to the others if you think you can find your way. I'll be back as soon as I can." Hopefully.

Wyn seemed to understand what Coran wasn't saying, and for a long moment, he looked like he was going to argue. Then, thankfully, he nodded, pulling Tik back as the boy tried to scramble past Coran. "Good luck," Wyn said.

Coran nodded, then crawled forward. Every inch of him was aching now, cramped from holding his shift and tingling with the urge to revert. That was one bright side to this plan--once he was through that vent, he wouldn't need to hold the form of an Arusian any longer. Wouldn't that be nice?

"Lealle would never let me live this down," he muttered, breathing hard as he dragged himself the last few feet to the vent. He could almost hear her, teasing him for being so out of shape. She'd always had a knack for shifting, just as Meri and Allura had. Coran had never had their talent, much less their endurance, but that hadn't stopped him from taking Lealle up on every challenge she set for him.

The clang of metal on metal startled Coran out of his thoughts, and he braced himself and scooted forward, squinting against the light as he peered down into the engine room below. His gaze went at once to the engine itself, looking for signs that it was tearing itself apart, but another clang reverberated through the room, and another, and very quickly Coran realized that wasn't the sound of the engine failing.

He turned his attention to the catwalk directly below him and saw Shiro, alone, his steps flagging as he fought four gladiators at once. Another lay sparking on the catwalk nearby, already dispatched by Shiro's wrist-blades. Another instant, and Shiro twisted, catching one of the gladiators as it charged and heaving it over the edge of the catwalk. It caught itself on the railing, and Shiro slashed through the metal on either side of its hand.

It plunged into the cavernous space below the catwalk, quickly consumed by the engine's glow--but Shiro's distraction had cost him. Two of the three remaining gladiators flanked him, and Shiro wasn't quick enough to get away. One cut a deep gouge in the back of his armor, and the other drove its staff into his gut, flinging him backwards down the catwalk.

Well, that just wouldn't do. Coran checked his belt for his spear--collapsed to its smallest setting for now, and even that was uncomfortably large in his Arusian hands. He brought the butt of it down on the vent, popping it off its screws, and slithered through, feet first.

He changed in midair, his body sliding easily out of the shift. It was a rush, returning to his own body, and a release of tension that made him holler as he activated his spear and dropped onto the nearest gladiator's head. His weight carried them both to the ground, and Coran grunted as he hit. He really was getting much too old for all this gallivanting about.

"Coran?"

Shiro sounded tired--but not too tired for surprise, which brought a smile to Coran's face as he sprung up, spinning his spear to ward off the gladiators. He backed toward Shiro, giving him a quick once-over. Injured, yes, but no worse than Coran. They'd make do. "These things giving you trouble, my boy?"

"Not now that you're here," Shiro replied, flashing a grin of his own.

Coran laughed, heady and maybe a little sleep-deprived, but in his defense, he'd been trying to fake optimism for other people's sake for hours on end, and now at last he didn't have to pretend. He widened his stance, raising his spear as the gladiators recovered and began once more to converge on him and Shiro, and he readied himself for a fight.

* * *

Keith was really starting to worry about Lance. Keturah kept throwing more and more at them--the temperatures soared so much it was stifling even through the paladin armor; gravity seemed to be steadily increasing, making each step more of a struggle than the last. The castle kept rearranging itself--Keith had _seen_ one hallway shift before his very eyes--and twice more Lance resorted to blasting through a wall when they couldn't find a passage going the direction they wanted.

Lance was getting more desperate with each passing minute, taking more risks against the gladiators that kept finding them--real gladiators, but also holograms mixed in with the rest to trip the paladins up--and Lance had taken several bad hits when he threw himself at the wrong enemy. He refused to slow long enough for the others to check him over, though, so yeah, Keith was worried. One look at Nyma said she felt much the same.

The only reason he hadn't yet suggested they stop to breathe and figure out their next step was because he knew exactly how well the suggestion would go over. This was the problem: Lance was the tactful one of them. Keith just threw himself at problems until they went away, which meant he wasn't very good at talking sense into people.

Another few minutes, and Nyma had finally had enough. She skipped the sense-talking and went straight to grabbing Lance by the arm and dragging him back so she could take a closer look at the crack in his armor where he'd taken a direct hit from a gladiator's sword.

"I'm fine, Nyma," he said. "Let me go."

Nyma raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't let go. "You're definitely not 'fine.' I haven't decided yet if you're hurt."

Lance opened his mouth, and Keith honestly though for a second he was going to have to break up a fight. Then voices reached them from down the hall--shouts of surprise, and of fear, a yelp of pain. The ring of metal on metal and the sharp whine of a laser pistol firing.

The color drained from Lance's face, and he took off running, ripping his arm out of Nyma's grip.

"Lance!" Keith cried, scrambling after him. "Wait! This could be another trap!"

Lance ignored him, like he’d already forgotten what had happened with the fake Luz. " _Mateo!_ "

The laserfire ahead intensified, and Keith shot Nyma a frantic, fleeting look before he doubled down and sprinted after Lance. He found him charging toward a group of gladiators that had surrounded Mateo, Edi, and Maka--unless this was another hologram. Two gladiators fell to headshots before Lance traded his rifle for his glaive and started hacking his way through, grunting as the gladiators shifted their attention to him and started hammering him with staff and sword.

Real gladiators, then. Keith didn’t know yet what that meant for the kids they appeared to be attacking.

A growl built behind Keith's teeth, and he charged in after Lance, focusing on the gladiators going for Lance's unprotected back. Somewhere out of his line of sight, Nyma opened fire with her rifle, dropping the gladiators at the edge of the group before they had a chance to go after the kids.

In moments, Lance had broken through the line, and he put an arm around Mateo's shoulder. Lance's eyes widened when this Mateo proved to be real, and he twisted to put Mateo behind him, switching back to his rifle at the same time. Only then did Keith realize the kids were armed--Edi with a staff that sparked at the ends, Maka with a pistol, and Mateo with a knife that shook despite his death grip on the hilt. All three of them were breathing heavily, drooping and trembling and wounded--mostly minor, from what Keith could see at a glance; bruises and shallow cuts and maybe some burns--but Maka and Edi were holding their own, now that there weren't quite so many gladiators swarming them.

They took down the last few gladiators one by one, until at last the corridor was quiet. Comparatively quiet. An alarm still blared, making Keith's ears twitch, and he glared at the nearest flashing light, debating the merits of smashing it in hopes that it would quiet the alarm in this area, too.

"Mateo," Lance breathed, letting his bayard dissipate as he turned and crushed Mateo in a hug. He muttered something on the exhale, his eyes closing for a brief moment.

Mateo dropped his knife and returned the hug just as fiercely, his fingers curling around the collar of Lance's armor. "Lance?"

Lance pulled back, his hands settling on Mateo's shoulders. "Are you okay? Where's Luz?"

"She ran off." Mateo face crumpled as Lance paled. "She said you were here, and she went to go find you, I guess. I tried to go after her but--"

Keith didn't stay to hear more. A fire had kindled in his chest, inexplicable and suffocating. He needed to find Luz. He needed to find her before Keturah did. Lance shouted after him as he ran, but he didn't slow. He knew where he had to go. He knew where _Luz_ would have gone, even if she didn't know it herself. She was connected to Red, after all; she would have gone to where she felt safest.

And, though Keith couldn’t have told anyone how he knew it, he _knew_ Keturah would be waiting.

* * *

Allura spun, her staff cracking against one gladiator's head and sending it crashing into--and through--the control console beside her. She winced, hoping Coran would forgive her for all the damage she was doing to his bridge.

"Any luck?" she called over her shoulder to Meri, who was frantically trying to tease, pry, or smash open the door inset into the floor that led down to the computer core. It had already been sealed when they arrived--locked and with the power cut so that it was impossible to open it without a fight--but Allura was beginning to suspect that Keturah had added some extra reinforcement of her own.

Meri grunted, and something clanged as she slammed it against the door.

Allura winced, but there were three more gladiators still out for blood, and she couldn't spare even a second to help Meri unless she wanted them both to be swarmed.

It was, unfortunately, not at all surprising that Keturah had gone to such lengths to seal off the computer core. Her memory cylinder was stored within, and destroying it was the only way Allura could think of to destroy her once and for all. So of course Keturah wasn't going to make it that easy.

Allura blocked a sword swinging for her head, then yelped as her feet lifted off the floor altogether. She twisted just in time to intercept a cheap shot from one of the other gladiators, but the force of the blow sent her spinning across the bridge, weightless, and she slammed against the forward viewscreen.

Meri activated her boots' magnetic anchors a moment before Allura. She abandoned her efforts to reach the computer core, launching herself instead at the nearest gladiator. Allura had made sure to stop by an armory before leaving New Altea, so Meri carried both a collapsible staff like Allura's and a compact pistol.

She used neither.

Her first punch staggered the gladiator, and she spun into a roundhouse kick that knocked it aside, but the next gladiator tackled her while Allura was still getting her feet back under her.

"Meri!" Allura cried. She twisted, anchoring her feet against the wall, and kicked off, firing her jets and slamming the gladiator against the console. She felt something crunch, and the gladiator's motions stuttered. It attempted one last, sluggish strike, which Allura easily sidestepped before driving her staff into its chest.

She turned, ready to help Meri with the two remaining gladiators--but at that moment, the Quintessence in the air changed. The breath went out of Allura's lungs, the air crisp and cold against her skin. Meri, flat on her back with two gladiators bearing down on her, held up a hand, and both gladiators froze.

There was no light show, no outward sign of what Meri had done, but a moment later both robots toppled, lifeless, and Meri righted herself, drifting a little until her mag boots locked her to the floor. She turned, then, and froze in horror at the sight of Allura standing there.

Her _glaes_ seemed to have bled, a thin sliver of violet curving down from the corner of her eye like a tear that had just begun to fall.

Allura opened her mouth to ask Meri what she'd just done, then thought better of it. She knew. She knew exactly what Meri had done, and she knew exactly where she'd learned it. She'd drained the gladiators of their Quintessence. Utterly.

And she looked like she wanted to be sick.

"Are you okay?" Allura asked instead, the magnets in her boots doing nothing to counteract the weightlessness that had her heart in her throat and her stomach turning somersaults inside her. She inched forward, each step cautious, and caught Meri's arm to steady her.

Meri's face scrunched up, tears threatening, but she pulled out of Allura's grip and returned to the hatch that led to the computer core. It was dented now, with deep gouges around the seams and even a few scorch marks. Meri resumed her work without a word--though it was more difficult now that she couldn't properly leverage her weight.

Allura stood a few feet away in a daze and watched. She didn't know when everything had gone so wrong--the day Keturah decided to betray her family, probably--but she felt as though she were living a stranger's life.

"Allura, how's it coming?" Shiro's voice was terse, breathless in a way that said he'd had his own horde of gladiators to fend off, though he didn't appear to be in the middle of a battle at the moment. The whine in the background said that Hunk was still fighting with the engines.

"Keturah's sealed off the computer core. We can't get in."

"She obviously knows what we're trying to do," Meri added, grunting as she struck the hatch one more time, then settled back on her heels and pulled off her helmet to wipe sweat from her forehead. Her hair lifted away from her scalp, floating around her head in a crimson halo.

Shiro cursed. "Is there anything else you can try? Hunk and Coran are barely treading water here." He paused for a beat, either hearing his own words or recognizing the stunned silence on the other end of the line. “Right. We found Coran--or, well, he found us.”

“Is he okay?” Meri asked, breathless, her spine rigid and her hands stilling in their work.

“As okay as any of us,” Shiro said. “Saved my ass from some gladiators. Wish it was that easy to fix the engine.”

"I'd like to see you do better." Coran’s voice was muted by distance, but he was obviously aiming for light indignation. The frustration and fatigue in his voice ruined the effect somewhat--but Allura didn’t care. He was there. He was okay. She closed her eyes, letting that fact wash over her as the others continued to bicker.

"He's right, though," Hunk said. "We've managed to keep it from overloading this long, and we can probably buy you a little more time, but Keturah keeps overriding all our fixes, and we can't get close enough to shut it down outright."

Allura squeezed her eyes shut, turning to pace the bridge. The hallway outside was silent for now, but she didn't trust that to mean Keturah hadn't already dispatched more gladiators to come harry them. That was the problem when your enemy had control of every aspect of the castle.

Every aspect, except perhaps one.

Allura's mouth ran dry as her eyes fell on a console that had somehow escaped the destruction of the previous fight. "I have an idea," she said, numb. "Just... give me a minute."

"Allura?" Meri asked. "What are you thinking?"

Allura only shook her head. She crossed to the console, calling up the screens she needed with deft touches. She worked quickly, unwilling to give Keturah enough time to notice what she was doing. Allura didn't think she could stop it, but she could divert power away from the console, which would mean the same end result.

There was no time for second thoughts.

Allura revoked the restrictions she'd placed on the AIs just a few short days ago. However Keturah had circumvented them, however she'd broken free to take control of the castle, she'd left the other AIs trapped. Allura was beginning to suspect that she'd planted the seeds of suspicion herself precisely so that Allura would enact those restrictions.

She was afraid.

Three holograms resolved on the bridge around her, faint and flickering but each bristling with rage.

"So it _was_ Keturah," Lealle said, her form freezing and flickering as hurt and anger and grief danced across her face. She shook her head, looking to Sa and Rukka, who seemed equally shaken, if not yet quite so angry. "She lied to us."

Allura's heart lurched in her chest, and she stepped forward on instinct, reaching out to offer comfort before remembering that these people were already dead, that they probably could barely connect the threat to the castle with the woman who had been their friend. Lealle, though--Lealle seemed to understand. Allura swore she could see tears shimmering in her eyes as she ordered Sa to the engine room to help Coran and Rukka to the training deck to try to wrest control of the gladiators back from Keturah.

Rukka and Sa flickered and vanished, and Lealle turned then to face Allura. She seemed to want to say something, but like Allura, she couldn't find the words.

"Mother..."

Lealle smiled, lifting a hand to Allura's face. Allura's skin tingled in anticipation of a touch that never came, and Lealle's smile turned sad. "I'm sorry," Lealle said, her eyes shifting to Meri for a moment as she drifted closer to Allura's side. "You both have suffered so much." She closed her eyes, and Allura leaned forward at the same moment as Lealle, leaning into an illusory embrace.

Lealle backed away first, and Allura could have sworn she felt her absence, though she had no physical presence.

"I'll stop her," Lealle said. "You two look out for each other, okay?”

“We will,” Meri promised, and Lealle smiled at her for a long moment before she, too, disappeared.

* * *

Luz was lost.

There was something, somewhere in the castle, that was calling to her. It _had been_ calling to her since--well, for a long time, she thought, but she’d only really started to notice it after the castle got captured. It wasn’t much at first--an urge to stay where her family could find her, an almost-there voice that made it hard to focus on whatever Mateo and the others were doing, pretending they were heroes, pretending they could fix things.

It had gotten stronger when the alarms started to blare. A sledge hammer to her brain telling her she needed to _move._ She’d followed it, thinking it was her brother, but that wasn’t it at all.

She wasn’t sure what it was that was calling her, but she recognized it. It was warm, and safe, and it was just up ahead.

Unfortunately, ‘just up ahead,’ right now, was a blank wall, and so she was left shifting from foot to foot, staring both ways down a hallway that didn’t take her where she wanted to go.

She’d tried not to think about what might be waiting for her out here, between her and the someone who was calling her. She’d tried not to think about any of it, ever since Mateo dragged her into the vents and told her they were all going to die.

(She knew people had died. People had been dying for a long time, and just because she didn’t see it didn’t mean she didn’t spend every day trying not to think about how Lance might not make it home from the next mission.)

She didn’t like to think about it, didn’t like to admit how powerless she was. She hadn’t wanted the kiddy weapon Mateo had given her earlier, but she’d kept it anyway, picking it up while he was out with Maka and Wyn because she _knew_ he was right, and she needed something to try to defend herself. Didn’t mean he needed to see her admit it.

She was powerless, yes. She wasn't like Edi--she wasn't trained for things like this, she didn't know how to handle danger. She wasn't like Maka, who thought he could do all the things the paladins did without even trying. She was just one girl, with no training and no superpowers. And, maybe, if she was being honest, with no courage, either.

She wasn't like her brothers that way.

But _something_ was calling to her, and it didn’t matter how much danger there was between here and there, or how pitifully unprepared she was to face it. She _needed_ to go, _needed_ it in a way she didn’t know how to explain. To ignore the call wasn’t an option.

So she’d left, and now she was lost, and it was getting harder not to think about the danger all around.

There were gladiator bots roaming the halls. None of them had seen Luz, yet, and she'd only spotted one as it turned a corner, but she could hear them all around. She could hear an awful lot more than she'd ever noticed before, and she couldn't convince herself that the pops, hums, and groans filling the air were normal.

She wanted Lance. Or, that failing, she wanted to find whoever it was who was calling to her. If she could find them, then she wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.

The problem was she'd left without knowing where she was going. It had all seemed so simple: follow the voice. It sounded stupid, saying it like that, but her feet knew where to carry her… right up until they led her to this dumb wall.

"It's not safe out here, you know."

Luz spun, choking on a scream as someone spoke in her ear. She stumbled back, curling her hands over her chest as she recognized the hologram woman who'd spoken--an Altean woman in paladin armor, with long black hair and the barest hint of a smile pulling at her lips.

"It's Luz, right? You're Lance's sister."

Luz nodded slowly. "I know you," she said. "You're... um..."

"Keturah." The woman's smile widened, and she beckoned Luz closer. "Are you lost?"

Luz hesitated, but the tug in her chest had quieted, and she squinted at Keturah, trying to figure out what it was that made her heart flutter at the sight of her. “No.”

“It’s all right if you are. It can be hard to follow your instincts. I didn’t understand it at first, either, but I can help you, if you like. I know the way.”

Luz blinked, her mind going quiet as Keturah watched her, her eyes crinkling with a knowing smile. That smile tugged at something deep in Luz’s gut, and she felt suddenly light-headed as the castle tried to turn itself around under her feet.

“ _You’re_ the one who was calling me?”

“Maybe.” Keturah clasped her hands at her waist. “Or maybe the same voice that’s been calling you is the one that brought me _here._ Come.”

She turned, walking down the hall to the left without another word, like there wasn’t even a chance Luz wouldn’t follow her.

Then again, what else was Luz going to do? Keep staring at a wall forever, or until the gladiators found her? At least Keturah understood why she was out here. At least she wasn’t treating Luz like a little kid who couldn’t take care of herself.

So Luz shoved down the nerves that had her feeling sick to her stomach and hurried after Keturah, following her through twisting hallways Luz didn’t think she’d ever seen before. The voice in the distance returned, growing stronger, until a door came into view up ahead. Keturah walked through it, the door opening only after she’d passed through. Luz bit her lip. She didn’t like being lost. Didn’t like being alone—Keturah barely counted, being basically a ghost and all.

But she’d come this far. She couldn’t stop now.

She entered the room--the hangar--and Luz's heart hit the floor. It wasn't empty--but it wasn't Lance waiting for her. It wasn’t any of the paladins, or their lions, or Akira’s soldiers. All there was was a strange alien ship, all sharp angles and pink lights. Luz hadn't ever seen an Empire ship up close, but even if she hadn't recognized the shapes she'd seen at a distance the few times her parents didn't bundle her off at the first sign of danger, she could have guessed what was happening from the Galra in the silver and red armor standing outside the ship with a red-eye robots on either side of him.

Luz started to back away, but the door closed behind her, the panel beside it turning red as the lock engaged.

"Ah, ah, ah." Keturah drifted into Luz's line of sight, seeming to glide above the floor. As she walked, her form flickered. She was younger, then older, the markings on her face deformed, her eyes suddenly blank before going back to normal and fixing on Luz. "No running, now. It's too late for that."

Luz was not brave. She wasn't like her brothers. She wasn't cut out for things like this--for staring down villains without shaking. In fact, she felt like she was going to burst into tears at any moment. But she lifted her chin, and she thought of every time she'd seen Mateo talk back to a teacher, or to their parents, or to their babysitter. She thought of every time Lance had flashed a smile when he was hurting so no one else would feel bad. She thought of Val when everyone thought Lance had died, how she'd refused to believe the lies, how she'd gone out there to find Lance and bring him home. She thought of Lance, when he'd come back. The first time Luz saw him in his paladin armor, she thought he looked like the hero in an action movie, or in one of his favorite video games.

She thought of her family, and she stared Keturah in the eye without blinking. "What are you going to do to me?"

Keturah smiled wide, and there was no mistaking the malice there now. "My dear child... We’re the same, you and I. We were both chosen by the Red Lion. You can feel the mark she’s left on this place. You can hear the echoes of her voice. I _know_ this about you, and I understand it in a way no one else ever will. I can help you learn to use it. I can make you _strong._ " She crouched down like Luz was a little kid--or maybe a dog--and Keturah was trying not to look so threatening. "This team doesn’t need you, Luz, but I do. I need someone to follow in my footsteps. I need a red paladin, and you’re the only one who can do it."

Her smile gave Luz chills, and it didn’t matter that her face had gone back to normal. Luz had seen that empty look in her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks like a skull’s, the sharp fangs behind her lips. Whatever Keturah was promising, Luz wanted no part of it.

She wished she could say she did something cool like the rest of her family would have done. She could have spit in Keturah's face, or made a break for it, or figured out something else to do to save herself.

But all she did was draw the little stun wand Mateo had given her and point it at the Galra soldier and his robots as she backed away. She knew she couldn't fight them, and she'd run away from anyone who might have helped her.

People died every day in the war.

But Luz didn’t want to be one of them.

The soldier raised his hand, and both robots started forward, backing Luz toward the door. There was nowhere to run, not unless she could jump high enough to get into the vents. There wasn't anywhere to hide, either, and the robots didn't care about the wand Luz held in shaking hands. They each had a gun, anyway, and they probably hadn't shot her only because they knew she couldn’t do anything to them.

Something slammed against the door behind her, and Luz nearly jumped out of her skin. She started to turn toward the sound, then remembered the robots, who didn't look bothered by what sounded like a gladiator throwing itself against the metal. The sound repeated itself, and the soldier's mouth turned down in a frown, his eyes darting to Keturah, who was staring off into space.

In the next instant, she soured, no longer even pretending to be a friend. "Grab the girl," she said. "Now."

Luz screamed, swinging her stun wand as the first robot reached for her. The tip sparked where it hit the robot’s arm, which jumped and jittered for a second before it knocked the weapon from her hand and grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her back toward the ship. She screamed again, clawing at the robot's hand and digging in her heels. "No! Let me go!"

There was another bang, this one followed by the groan of something grinding against metal, and then a low, sharp _pop._

" _Luz!_ "

Zuza came barreling into the room, leaping on top of the robot holding Luz. She held a staff that was bent in the middle, and it bent more as Zuza beat the robot over the head with it until it let go of Luz.

The second robot raised its gun and fired, and Zuza yelped, ducking her head and throwing her weight to the side--still clinging to the robot--so that it staggered, turned. The other robot's next shot burned through its back, and it lost its balance, stumbling to the side and against the wall as Zuza dropped to the ground, landing on all fours and almost immediately launching herself at the other robot.

"Luz, run!" Zuza cried. "Get out of here!"

Luz glanced over her shoulder. The door Keturah had brought her through was open at an angle, bent out away from the frame and crumpled like a crushed soda can. Had _Zuza_ done that?

It was open; that was what mattered. Warped and crooked so it wouldn't close again, no matter how much Keturah tried. Luz made it two steps toward the ruined door, but on the third, her foot didn't find the floor. She flailed, her insides turning over as she lifted into the air, flipping upside down in slow motion until she hit a wall and bounced off.

She blinked, her vision swimming as she found herself looking up at the floor of the hangar, where Keturah still stood, glowing blue and utterly serene. Everyone else was floating, like Luz was--Zuza still wrestling the robot for its gun, the soldier clinging to the edge of the opening into his ship. The other robot was still dead, and it bumped against the wall and started drifting lazily out into the middle of the room.

Keturah turned her head, her eyes finding Luz. She narrowed her eyes, and suddenly Luz was falling--but not toward the ground. She fell horizontal, the Imperial ship racing up to meet her. She wheezed as she slammed against the side of it, and the world spun again. This time Luz _was_ falling down--right next to the soldier, who recovered quicker than Luz and grabbed her, throwing her over his shoulder.

"Zuza!" Luz cried, kicking and hammering her fists against the soldier's shoulder. He didn't even flinch. "Help!"

Zuza might have said something; she might have cursed, or just screamed wordlessly. Luz was in too much of a panic to hear. She could see the inside of the ship now--cold metal and low lights and altogether different from the alien ships she'd seen up til now. She couldn't breathe, even to call for help. She might have been crying; she felt like she was crumbling, every piece of her falling inward and crushing her chest.

Suddenly, the soldier stumbled, and Luz lurched against his shoulder, her stomach heaving.

"Luz!"

Luz looked up and found Keith there, his sword buried in the soldier's side, his eyes wide and scared.

He wasn't supposed to be scared. He was a _paladin_.

He grabbed her, leaving his sword in the soldier's side and kicking him in the back. Keith staggered back, too, and fell down the ramp with Luz on top of him. Luz clung to him, her heart pounding. "Keith," she said. "Keith, Keturah's--"

"I know. _Vrekt._ "

Keith hugged her against him and they rolled, something clanging close beside them. The next time Luz looked up, the soldier was standing over them, one hand holding his side, the other raising a sword over his head. He swung again, and Keith rolled again, hissing in pain as he did. Was he hurt? There was no time to look; Keith continued the roll until he got his feet under him and stood upright, swinging Luz to her feet and planting himself in front of her. She held onto the back of his armor, ducking to watch under his arm as he faced off with the soldier.

"Lance." Keith was out of breath, and Luz was pretty sure he _had_ gotten hurt, because he sounded shaky in a way that made Luz want to close her eyes and wish this all away. "I found her. Red's hangar. We've got company."

He grunted, taking one big step back. Luz stumbled backward with him, almost toppling, but Keith reached back to steady her. He had his sword back, and Luz didn't know if he'd found it on the floor somewhere, or if it was magic like the Lions and he could just conjure it out of thin air.

The weightlessness returned, Luz's feet lifting once more off the ground. She whimpered, wrapping her arms around Keith's waist--but just a moment later, they dropped back to the floor with a jolt. Luz stumbled, but Keith maintained his footing, even managing to block the soldier's next attack as Keturah hissed in surprise.

"Keturah."

The voice thundered through the hangar, cold and hard in a way that made everything seem to slow for a moment. Luz lifted her head, searching for the woman who had spoken, but there was no one there. Keturah stood frozen in the middle of the room--actually frozen, like a movie that had been paused, her hair hanging funny, like she'd started to turn and her hair had fanned out, and hadn't had time to settle again before time stopped.

Luz blinked, and suddenly another hologram woman stood before Keturah. She was a few inches shorter than Keturah, her hair shorter and curlier, her eyes sad in a face that otherwise looked as angry as anyone Luz had ever seen--angrier than her mother had been when she caught Val telling Luz and Mateo that Lance was still alive, back when Val was the only one who had believed it.

"Lealle."

Keturah's voice was barely a whisper, but it carried in the hush that had fallen over the hangar. Lealle smiled.

"You killed me," Lealle said. She curled her hand into a fist, and a dagger materialized in her grip--a dagger that looked a lot like the one Keith had, Luz realized after a moment. Lealle stared at it, then back at Keturah. "I remember that, now. Every last detail. How much it hurt. How sad Zarkon looked. I always figured I didn't remember dying because I didn't want to. I didn't create my profile to hold something like that, so when they were pulling memories from my corpse, the moment of my death just didn't take. Now I have to wonder whether you did something to me. Whether you made me forget."

Keturah laughed once, bitterly. "I was going to. Couldn't risk you giving my game away. But you'd already locked those memories away for me. I guess you didn't want to think about it, either."

“ _Why?_ ” Lealle’s voice broke on the word, her face scrunching up like she was going to cry, and she bared her teeth like she was going to jump on Keturah and fight her tooth and nail. “Why did you do it? Why did you kill me?”

“I don’t know.”

Lealle blinked, confusion muting her anger for a moment.

Keturah smiled then, and somehow she managed to look sad. “I don’t. She didn’t give me those memories. I only know who I was, and who I am now.”

She trailed off, and Lealle stared at her, her eyes still bright with tears, her jaw clenched, her hand shaking as it held her knife. Neither of them said anything for a long moment, but Luz couldn’t help feeling like maybe they were talking still and she just couldn’t hear it.

The stillness shattered. Both holograms flickered out, but they left a storm in their wake. The gravity vanished, then reappeared twofold, settling over Luz like a lead blanket. The lights flashed and fizzled, whole panels going dark and staying that way as the storm spread through the hangar. The far door opened, groaning and fighting for every inch, and a chill swept over Luz as she looked out through a shimmering barrier at empty space.

She'd never been so close to nothing before, and she couldn't take her eyes off it now, even as Keith started shoving her backwards, toward the mangled door to the hallway beyond.

A horrible shriek rang out through the speaker over the door, like nails on a chalkboard mixed with the squeal of feedback and static so loud it made Luz's ears hurt. She clapped her hands over her ears, stumbling into a run as Keith turned and dragged her along, an arm around her shoulders keeping her close. The lights continued to go dark one by one until the only light in the entire hangar was the glow of Keith's armor and the eyes of the robot still wrestling with Zuza across the way.

A laser lit up the darkness, and a scream froze Luz in her tracks, and she turned toward the silhouettes of the robot and Zuza, who was now on the ground, moaning in pain. The Galra soldier stood over her, the barrel of his gun still glowing with residual heat.

"Grab her," he said.

He turned, his eyes flashing in the darkness as they fixed on Luz. She tried to run after Zuza as the soldier and the robot dragged Zuza into the waiting ship, but everything was too heavy, and she couldn't breathe, and when Keith put his sword away and picked her up with both arms around her waist, she couldn't even fight it.

The barrier between Luz and the stars flickered, and for just an instant Luz and Keith seemed to be caught in a hurricane. The wind nearly carried them away, but Keith forced her to the ground, then dropped on top of her, one hand driving his dagger into the floor as an anchor, the other fumbling with the catch of his helmet.

"Put this on," he told her.

Luz stared at him, then cried out as he shoved his helmet over her head. It caught her hair and pulled, but it settled into place and she smelled something metallic in the air.

"What's happening?" she asked, her voice shaking.

Keith's eyes glowed, and in a sudden flash of light she saw that he was smiling. "Nothing," he said. "You're going to be okay."

He was lying, and Luz knew it. If everything was fine, why force his helmet on her? She didn't have any other armor, so what did it matter if she had a helmet or not?

The barrier flickered again, disappearing for a little longer this time, and suddenly Luz understood. That was space out there, beyond the thin, mostly-clear barrier. There was nothing there, just a vacuum, and Keturah was trying to take the barrier down. Keith's helmet must have made its own air, or had a supply stored up inside to keep her from suffocating if Keturah got her way.

"No." Luz wriggled, trying to get her arms free from where they were pinned, one squished between her hip and Keith's arm, the other sandwiched between them. She needed to take the helmet off. She needed to give it back to Keith. Without it, he'd--

"It's okay, Luz," Keith said. "I promised your brother I wouldn't let anything happen to you."

With a roar, the engine of the Empire ship came to life, and Keith bowed his head until his forehead rested against the visor of Luz's helmet. He was shaking. Luz wondered if it was because he knew Zuza was on that ship, or because he was afraid to die.

(People died every day in this war. Today, maybe it was Zuza. But it didn’t have to be Keith. It _wouldn’t_ be, if Luz could just get her hands free.)

The ship blasted out through the open hangar door, and the barrier shattered as it passed, little bits of energy hanging in the air, sparkling like stars, in the instant before the air all tried to leave the hangar at once.

_**No.** _

Luz wasn't sure she heard the voice--she wasn't sure she _could have_ , over the howling of the wind and her own terrified screams. Keith clung to her, and to his dagger, anchoring them in place as the wind tried to lift them both off the floor. She heard the voice, anyway, crystal clear and closer than anything.

_**Not this time.** _

All at once, the noise and the wind were gone. Luz dropped to the ground, Keith landing on top of her and forcing all the air out of her lungs. He gasped, then coughed, and Luz, finally working her arms free, pulled her helmet off, shoved it at Keith, and burst into tears. Still wheezing, Keith rolled off her, but kept his arms around her, pulling her into a hug she was too tired to resent.

He'd just almost _died_ to protect her, and it was all her own stupid fault. He shouldn’t be the one comforting her right now.

Slowly, she became aware of a soft blue glow filling the darkness. Everything was quiet and still now, the silence that hung over libraries and empty churches--part reverence, part expectation, part fear.

Two figures glowed in the center of the hangar, not quite the holograms they had been. They looked like pictures of ghosts people took in haunted houses, like the afterimages left behind when you stared too long at a bright light--perfectly still except that they seemed to drift a little as Luz chased them with her eyes.

She recognized Lealle first, standing with one hand outstretched, a smile halfway turned to horror on her face as she stared at nothing. The knife she'd held just a moment ago was sticking out of her back, clearer than the rest of her.

Keturah knelt in the exact same spot, but facing the other way, her head tilted back, her spine rigid. Her image jumped and danced this way and that in the cold, dark air, and when it stilled, it was overlapping Lealle’s in a way that made it look almost like the knife in Lealle’s back had also been plunged into Keturah’s heart.

The entire image shivered, and for a second, it almost looked like both figures were crying, light tracing curving paths down their cheeks.

Then they were gone. The knife pulsed once more before it, too, vanished into the dark.

* * *

Allura knew the moment the fight was done. Not just because the latest wave of gladiators suddenly froze, all the fight gone out of them. Not just because the comms suddenly filled the cries of triumph and relief.

She knew, because the air suddenly felt lighter--and emptier. She took a step back, the fatigue finally catching up to her, and Meri steadied her before she could fall. She turned, looping one arm around Meri's shoulder and pressing a kiss to her temple. Then she turned toward the hatch in the floor.

It opened without protest at her approach, and she held her breath as she swung her leg down to the first rung of the ladder below. Meri followed, silent. Allura wondered if she, too, knew what she would find below.

Keturah's memory cylinder had shattered, its light gone dark, the glass glittering on the floor in the light of the other cylinders around it.

A few feet away, Lealle's cylinder was the same.

"No," Meri breathed, and Allura only smiled, her tears spilling over. Meri was calling for Rukka and Sa, frantic, asking them if there was any trace of Lealle left in the system, any way to salvage her memory profile. But Allura already knew the answer would be no.

Her mother was gone now, well and truly.

"Meri," Allura said, taking her hand. There were tears in both their eyes, and Allura's throat closed to the point that she couldn't talk for a long moment. She pulled Meri into a hug, breathing through the pain.

"I'm so sorry, Allura. I'm _so_ sorry."

Allura shook her head, then pulled back. "It's done," she said. "Let's go find Coran."


	4. A Moment to Breathe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... The paladins have succeeded in retaking the castle, and in locating Pidge and the Green Lion, but the victory is bittersweet. Keith almost died protecting Luz from Keturah's attacks, Zuza was taken by the Empire, and Lealle's AI destroyed herself along with Keturah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Deals with topics surrounding Ryner's death and the emotional effect it's had, but doesn't go too deep into any of it.

"Luz!"

Keith's head spun, Lance's voice echoing all around him, and it took him longer than it should have to identify where it was coming from. He looked up as Lance sprinted across the empty hangar toward him. Or, more specifically, toward Luz, who was still huddled up against Keith's chest, sniffling and trying not to let it show.

She stiffened now, though, then twisted, her face crumpling when she caught sight of Lance. She wriggled out of Keith's hold, and he let her go, forcing stiff hands to unclench. He couldn't make himself forget the breathless cold of the vacuum--breathless in more sense than one. The panic of not being able to breathe had lasted for endless moments before oblivion started to creep in.

That had been the worst part, he thought. The fading. Knowing he was dying but not being able to muster the presence of mind to feel anything about it.

Keith was slow to pick himself up--slow enough that Nyma reached him and practically lifted him clean off the ground before he'd even gotten his feet under him.

"What the _hell_ happened?" Nyma demanded.

There was something in her tone that snapped Keith's focus back into place, and he straightened, clamping down on the pain in his back as a wound there twinged. "Later," he said.

Nyma frowned at him, her eyes going to Lance, Mateo, and Luz, who were tangled together just a few feet away, Edi and Maka keeping watch by the door. Nyma's lips tightened, and she nodded. She obviously knew something bad had happened. She'd probably seen the pain he tried not to show.

But anyone could see that Luz was distraught. She knew that Keith had almost died, and she clearly blamed herself for everything that had happened. She didn't need it rubbed in her face.

So Keith leaned on Nyma, every inch of him aching, and he managed a weary nod when Lance looked his way. All three of the Mendozas were shaking, Lance even more than Luz, though he was fighting with every piece of him not to let Luz see how scared he was.

The comms crackled, and for a moment, all Keith heard was Shiro's labored breathing. "Is it over?"

Keith looked to where Lealle and Keturah's final images had been, and his heart ached. "Yeah," he said, closing his eyes and letting Nyma take a little more of his weight. "It's over."

* * *

_It's over._

The words bounced around inside Coran's head, echoing and unreal. The engine had wound down to a more reasonable hum a few moments ago, the sound of Shiro's latest battle against the gladiators petering out at the same time. Even after Keith confirmed that it was over, Coran waited for some trick. He scrambled up out of the engine well and over to the computer terminal nearby, where he searched for signs of Keturah's influence. She had to have something else up her sleeve, some last trick waiting to catch them unawares.

There was nothing.

The computer responded to Coran's commands just as it always had. A few keystrokes reset the life support systems to their intended settings. Another command and the engine powered down entirely, the glow fading to nothing and leaving the room hollow and dark. He shook his head, feeling dazed. "What happened? Allura?"

For a long while, Allura said nothing. Then, faint and strangled: "It wasn't us. But... her core has shattered. I don't know how, but she's gone."

"It was Lealle." Keith faltered, his words hanging in a stunned silence. "I don't know what she did, exactly, but she was just here. She said... She said she remembered--dying. She remembered what Keturah did. I think they fought, somehow? But--Allura..."

"I know. Her core was shattered, too."

Allura's voice remained level, but Coran could hear the pain that lurked just beneath the surface. Beside him, Shiro breathed out, soft and pained, and Coran clasped his shoulder.

"We're still down in the engine room. Going to need to do some checks before we go anywhere; I don't like how much strain she put on the engine, overloading it like that. The teludav will need some work, too, for that matter.” Coran cringed. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing how much damage Bee’s explosive charges had done. “Why don't you come down here, and we'll... We'll go from there."

The vent overhead groaned, and Shiro tensed, clearly expecting an attack. Coran held him back, unsurprised to see Wyn and Tik dropping to the ground.

"I thought I told you to go back."

Wyn looked away, but Tik only shrugged, bounding up to the console where Coran stood and peering at the screen.

"You said it's over, right?" Wyn asked.

Coran took a deep breath, then pulled Wyn into a hug. "That's right. It's over now."

* * *

Meri and Allura made it to the engine room before Lance's group, and they found Hunk and Coran up to their elbows in diagnostics and repairs. Shiro welcomed them both with an embrace, and against her better judgment, Meri leaned into the touch. She felt shaky and lost, and she knew the smile she offered Wyn, when she caught him looking, didn't even begin to pass for okay.

Then Coran was there, barely pausing to shed his harness as he sprinted over to them. Allura met him halfway, flinging her arms around his neck, and he caught her, spinning her around as they clung to each other. "You're all right," Allura whispered, her emotions finally breaking past her control. "You're all right."

Coran shushed her, kissing the side of her head as she cried into his shoulder. Then his eyes found Meri, and her own barricades wavered as his eyes instantly welled. He held an arm out in invitation, and Meri couldn't hold herself back. Half a year away from home, away from Coran's kind smiles and warm hugs and easy conversation. Half a year feeling small and impotent in the face of everything Keturah had built. She hadn't realized how much she'd needed Coran to make everything okay.

They clung to each other for long moments, swaying on the spot, fighting back tears--or surrendering to them, in Allura's case. Meri didn't want to let go, and Coran made no move to pull away, and though Allura's breathing steadied, she kept her face turned into Coran's shoulder, even as the others finally filed in, Lance with his brother and sister on either side of him, Nyma supporting Keith and lagging behind, Maka and Edi carrying weapons and keeping watch like warriors expecting an attack.

Lance looked inches from collapse, and that, finally, was enough to pull Meri away from Coran. She crossed to him, putting on a happier shift for Luz and Mateo's sake, and she pulled them into a hug--even Lance, who resisted for a moment, and then clung to her as tightly as either of his siblings.

"Does this mean we can go help the others, now?" Maka asked, scowling and trying to look tough. He managed it far too well, despite the fatigue pulling at the corner of his eyes, the singed fur along his forearm, the way he shifted his weight to favor one leg so subtly Meri wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t focused on him. (Edi looked much the same, now that she took the time to notice.) It broke Meri's heart to see someone so young looking so old.

"The others?" Shiro asked.

Maka caught himself fiddling with the pistol holstered at his side and crossed his arms over his chest. "Yeah. We managed to sneak away when the attack started, but most people weren't so lucky. We saw a bunch of them being held prisoner. I wanted to help, but _someone_ wouldn't let me."

"There's no way we could have staged a jailbreak on our own, Maka, you _know_ that." Edi's ears twitched violently, and she shot a nervous look at Allura. "It's not that I didn't _want_ to help--"

"You made the right call," Allura said, finally stepping away from Coran to lay her hands on Edi’s shoulders. "Even all of us together couldn't have freed the prisoners and protected them before we knew the castle was safe. Sometimes you have to start with what you can do."

Edi looked like she might cry--all the more so when Shiro joined Allura and nodded his approval. "You've done very well, Edi. Now, how would you like to help us finish the job? Can you take us to where you saw the prisoners?"

Edi nodded, and Maka quickly inserted himself into the group--Shiro, Nyma, and Shay, along with the two children, and a handful of Guardsmen who would meet them on the way while Layeni and most of her men to continue their methodical search. At the same time, Coran sent Wyn with Allura to take her to, _apparently_ , a secret room Coran had never bothered to tell anyone about, where Tev, Dagmar, and Bee were still hiding.

Lance stayed with Luz and Mateo, and Meri stayed to hover over them, and over Coran, who quickly returned to the engine well to help Hunk with repairs. Keith left Lance and his siblings, claiming he was going to help Coran and Hunk, but once he was out of Lance's line of sight, he simply sat down, leaning his head back against a console and closing his eyes.

Between Keith, the children, and Coran--who didn’t say anything, but occasionally stopped, stiffening with unspoken pain--not to mention the civilians and their untold injuries, Meri suspected the infirmary was going to see a lot of use while the surviving engineers got the engines back up and running.

* * *

In the end, it was hours before they got the ship moving and even longer until Kolivan found a crew for one of the surviving New Altean vessels with the capacity to open a wormhole large enough to fit the castle-ship. Even that was faster than attempting to jury-rig a teludav with no supplies, though, and half a day after retaking the castle, they finally returned to New Altea. Lance spent the entire time sitting with Luz and Mateo smack dab in the middle of the catwalk overlooking the engine because all of them were quite simply too tired to move, and it wasn't like the place was crowded enough for them to be a bother.

Nyma dragged Keith off at some point, Allura and Shay fluttering around like a couple of mother hens, and Lance might have been more worried about that if Luz were acting at all like herself. He knew only the bare bones of what had happened down in Red's hangar. Keturah had wanted something with Luz, Keith and Zuza had interfered, and Zuza had been taken. Lealle and Keturah fought, and destroyed each other.

There was obviously more to it than that. Keith was hurt, and Luz hadn't said a word since she'd latched onto Lance. She wasn't crying, but she wasn't looking at anyone, either, and she shied away from Mateo's every attempt to comfort her. She was, even now, curled up against Lance's side. She might have been asleep, but Lance didn't think so.

No one was sleeping right now, even the ones who had nothing else to do but wait for Coran's crew to finish their work.

But then, at last, the wait was over. Coran called up to the bridge, where Allura headed up a crew that was only half regulars. Lance had heard whispers--this person had died, that person was badly injured, most of them people Lance didn't know, but whom Coran obviously did. He looked older than he ever had before, tired and sad and weighted down.

Then again, who _wasn't_ all those things right now?

Mateo had begun to doze by now, though Luz was still too stiff to be asleep. With both of them lying on top of him, Lance couldn't exactly reposition or turn to see what was happening, but he held his breath, and he listened to the hushed conversation, and he breathed a sigh of relief once he was sure that his hopes weren't in vain. They were ready to go.

The engine hummed as it started up again, and Mateo stirred before going back to sleep. Minutes later--no time, and yet longer than Lance could stand--they were through. There was no way to tell, of course--not from inside the castle, away from any windows through which he might have seen the wormhole--but Lance knew the moment they arrived at New Altea all the same. The gathered engineers released a collective sigh of relief, and half of them headed at once for the door, the other half lingering only to give each other hugs, to cry out in joy, to clap each other on the back.

Lance's heart drummed in his chest, and he gently shook Luz and Mateo awake. "Hey. We're here."

Mateo yawned, stretching dramatically and smacking Lance in the face in the process--accidentally, Lance was sure. He smiled anyway, though it faded when he turned to Luz, who had lifted her head, but otherwise gave no reaction to Lance's statement.

"New Altea," Lance said, in case Luz hadn't understood. "Mom and Dad are down there. You ready to get going?"

Mateo leaped up at once and then, seeming to realize he was being too eager, he shoved his hands into his pockets. Luz was slower to stand, and she pulled away from Lance once she was on her feet, staring at the ground. Meri came up beside her, rubbing her back, and smiled at Lance.

"Are we going, or not?"

Lance smiled, though he didn't really feel like it. He hadn't seen Nyma in hours, but he knew her well enough to suspect that she'd have stayed in full armor, helmet and all--it was too soon after the threat had passed, and the castle still felt too big, too foreign. He tuned his comms to her frequency. "Hey, Nyma? We're headed down to the surface. You wanna join us?"

"Go on ahead," Nyma said, distracted. "I'll catch up with you later."

On another day, Lance might have tried to pry out of her what had her sounding so preoccupied, but right now, all he wanted was to get back to his family.

Hunk and Shay took them down in Yellow, broadcasting the clearance codes Kolivan had provided the paladins. The last thing any of them wanted was to get shot down now by some jumpy, sleep-deprived defense force. They got their clearance in short order, and reached the hangar within moments. Someone must have called ahead--Allura, probably. She'd have thought about things like that.

Whoever had called, Lance's family was waiting in the hangar when they landed. His parents, his aunt and uncle, and Sebastian, all of them bouncing on their toes, waiting for the instant Yellow settled enough for them to come forward. Mateo raced ahead of Lance down the ramp, throwing himself at their parents with the story of the last day and a half already pouring out of him--most of it something Lance's mother would probably rather not have known, if her sudden pallor was any indication.

Luz stayed quiet, hovering in Lance's shadow, right up until Rosa caught sight of her and said her name. Then, all at once, the dam burst, and Luz sprinted the last few feet and fell sobbing into her mother's arms. Lance's heart ached, but he was here, and Luz and Mateo were here, and everything felt a little less precarious than it had just a few hours ago--just a few _moments_ ago.

By the time he reached his mother, Mateo had twisted to hug his dad instead, leaving Rosa with one free arm to pull Lance into her embrace, and Lance didn't fight it in the slightest. Nor did he fight his father's suggestion (order) that they all go back to their rooms and try to get some rest. After the last few days, Lance needed it, and for the first time in ages, he thought he might actually get it.

* * *

It was a long, silent wait for Keith's cryo cycle to finish, but Nyma didn't mind. With all the civilians and half of Coran's crew off-loaded to New Altean facilities for medical attention and rest, and the remainder combing through the innards of the castle looking for any lasting damage Keturah's possession may have caused, there was no one to give Nyma grief for pacing the med bay like a fretting grandmother.

Shiro joined her a few hours in. Didn't say anything, just watched her for a few minutes, then extended a cot from the wall so he could lay down while he waited. Nyma eyed him, weighing the odds that he'd actually let himself sleep--not high, but worrying about Keith was enough emotional labor for one day.

Hell, Shiro was probably concerned about _her_. The whole team knew she wasn't one to get worked up about injuries, except maybe when Val was the one hurt. Nyma had seen enough of this war to know that these things happened. You didn't worry in the moment, not if you wanted to give your friend a fighting chance at survival. And you didn't worry once they were in a pod, because at that point the danger was essentially nil.

And yet Nyma couldn't make herself calm down. Maybe it was misplaced paranoia about the lovely little surprises Keturah had inevitably left behind in the castle's systems. Maybe she was just overtired and overly emotional because of that.

Maybe she was keenly aware of the little secret Blue had shared with her and the others in the Heart. Red had chosen Nyma, whatever the hell that meant. Red had chosen her, and Blue had tasked her with looking out for Keith and Matt.

Hell of a job she was doing so far.

The console gave a soft beep to indicate that the healing cycle was winding down, and Shiro was on his feet so fast there was no pretending he'd been asleep. Nyma pulled back, letting him be the one to steady Keith when he came out of the pod, to check him over and make sure he was okay. It was enough for Nyma just to see him upright and free from pain, even if he was still a little bleary-eyed.

On the bright side, the cryopod had forced him to get at least a few hours of sleep, which was more than most of the team could say.

Eventually, of course, Keith noticed her standing there, and his brow furrowed. Nyma strode forward before he had too much time to speculate. She stopped just short of Keith and Shiro, who was still offering support Keith didn't really need, and crossed her arms. "Better?" she asked. "Ready to tell my _why_ you looked like death walking when we found you? You were gone for like ten minutes, Keith, how the hell did you get so beat up in that amount of time?"

Keith scowled. "Keturah was trying to take Luz. I couldn't let her do that."

Nyma's stomach curdled. She'd been afraid of something like that, what with all the fretful looks Keith had sent Luz's way, how he tried to stay out of her line of sight, or to put on a brave face when she _could_ see him. Poor kid probably blamed herself.

"What do you mean she wanted to take Luz?" Shiro asked, a dangerous note in his voice. "Why? Why _take_ her, and not just kill her?"

“Why capture most of the civilians, and not just kill _them?_ ” Keith shot back, then shook his head, his shoulders slumping. "I don’t know, Shiro. If anyone said anything about what they wanted with Luz, it was before I got there, and Luz was too upset to ask her about it afterwards."

Shiro's frown only deepened, but his comms chimed at that moment. His, Nyma's, and Keith's, where it sat waiting for him on the other side of the room. Keith went to get dressed while the other two checked their comms.

All at once, the wind went out of Nyma, and she found herself searching for somewhere to sit down.

"The others are back," Shiro said, and even he sounded a little breathless. "Red and Green Lions, headed our way."

Keith straightened, tripping over his armor, as he was in the middle of putting it on. "They found them? Did they say what happened?"

"They haven't said anything." Shiro put his comms unit away and offered Keith a thin smile. "This is the first I've heard that they were on their way back."

The silence didn't bode well for whatever they'd found out there, and Nyma couldn't fully convince herself that the presence of the Green Lion counterbalanced that. Keith and Shiro were obviously thinking along the same lines, and as soon as Keith was dressed, they all headed out.

The castle was settled in Hangar B, along with the other Lions, and that was no doubt where Red and Green were being sent. The massive doors overhead were already open when Nyma and the others emerged; the castle was too tall for them to close, and it took up most of the floor space. Whatever other ships may have been here before the castle's arrival had been relocated, and there was just enough room for Red and Green to squeeze in beside the other Lions.

Hunk, Shay, and Coran were already waiting when Nyma and the others arrived, and it was only a few moments longer before Meri, Allura, and Lance joined them--Lance dressed in pajamas and sandals that slapped against the pavement with every step he took. He'd clearly just woken up, though the news, or the sprint to the hangar, seemed to have brought him fully awake.

Both Lions' ramps descended, and the hangar itself held its breath, waiting for someone to step out and fill them all in on what had happened.

When someone finally appeared, however, it only made Nyma's stomach twist tighter with the kind of anxiety that couldn't be condensed into questions. Val and Akira stepped out of the Green Lion together, both of them weary, solemn, and silent. Behind them, Green shut her mouth and sat up--and Pidge was nowhere in sight.

Nyma only had a moment to contemplate the worst case scenario. Shiro stepped toward his brother, heartbreak on his face, but movement from Red had caught Nyma's eye. Karen, Matt, and Pidge appeared there, all of them red-eyed, beat-down, miserable... They didn't look hurt, physically, but something terrible must have happened. Something worse than the loss they already knew about.

Pidge gave one look at the pinched faces staring back at them and froze. They opened their mouth, then shut it again, their face contorting in pain and the threat of tears.

In the next instant, they'd turned, ducking away from Karen's comforting hand, and stormed toward the castle. Karen called after them, a broken sound, but they didn't stop, and no one seemed to want to be the first to chase after them.

"What happened?" Shiro asked as they disappeared inside. He sounded as lost as the rest of them, helpless and aching with sympathy. Val and Akira traded looks, shifting uncomfortably but remaining silent. Matt turned his back on Shiro and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, the tense set of his shoulders doing nothing to diminish the growing dread stifling the group.

Finally, Karen sighed. "They found Sam," she said, and hurried on, because Shiro looked like he was about to say something. "Haggar...did something to him. Took control of him. Linked him to the false Green Lion Pidge and Ryner encountered on Renxora. As I understand it, she wants him to be Zarkon's green paladin, to replicate a real paladin as closely as possible."

Her voice so far had remained neutral, reciting facts without inflection, but she faltered here, her eyes fluttering closed.

"Sam... Haggar used him to-- He... killed Ryner."

Nyma felt like she'd just been sucker-punched. She staggered backward a step, painfully aware of the shock and horror mirrored all around her. Lance wavered on his feet, covering his mouth like he was about to puke. Hunk turned around, helplessness written in the lines around his eyes, one hand lifted to pull at his hair. Keith glanced in the direction Pidge had gone, every inch of him listing toward them but his feet rooted in place.

Shiro was the only one to venture forward, drawing Matt's attention with a light touch on his arm before wrapping him in an embrace.

Val locked eyes with Nyma from across the room, and the deep, aching sorrow there said that, no, Nyma wasn't the only one who's mind was running away with the implications of this revelation.

She didn't realize she'd collapsed until Coran knelt in front of her, one hand on her forehead and the other supporting her under the elbow. "You're all right," he said, leaning close so the people who had rushed over to check on her couldn't hear. "You're all right, Nyma." He paused, his eyes softening. "It might be time to tell them."

He was more right than he knew--because this wasn't just about Sam. It wasn't just about Rolo. Pieces were clicking into place, and Nyma hated that she was twisted enough to see how it all fit together, but she was too cynical to hope that she might be wrong.

"Help me up," she said, even as she struggled to get her feet back under her. Val was there to steady her as she straightened, and Nyma screwed her eyes shut, her throat going tight as everyone stared at her in alarm and trepidation. "There's something I need to tell you. Something I probably should have told you a while ago. But in my defense, I thought there was a good chance it was all a heaping pile of shit."

Coran squeezed her shoulder, and she took comfort in the fact that he hadn't thought it was all that important that the team know, either. Important for Nyma's peace of mind, maybe, but not because it might be the biggest threat they'd ever face.

She laid it all out for them now--the message she'd received from the Delegate at the summit on Eltava telling her Rolo was still alive. The follow-up some weeks later claiming that he was being held with Sam.

"You're saying Haggar might be turning Rolo into a paladin like she did with Sam?" Keith asked.

Nyma laughed, her vision blurring. "I wish that was all I'm saying."

Allura frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know if you heard, but Haggar tried to take Luz. She already has Sam and Rolo, if the Delegate is telling the truth. She made a point of taking Rax-- _specifically_ Rax. We know she's using Sam as her green paladin, and we know that she gave Zarkon a new Black Lion clone to stroke his ego."

"They're building a new Voltron," Shiro breathed, every inch of him rigid.

Nyma spread her arms. "They're building a new Voltron," she said. "The most powerful weapon in existence. And they're making it out of our family so we won't want to destroy it."

* * *

There was no relaxing after a revelation like that. Sure, Shiro and Allura tried their hardest to persuade everyone to get some rest, but there was a sense of urgency hanging over them all. Bad enough that Sam Holt was the victim of Haggar's plot--but Rolo, Rax, and now Zuza, too?

Meri stuck around long enough to chase Lance and Val back to the Mendoza family's quarters, to reassure Hunk and Shay, both of whom were almost sensible enough to let themselves sleep--just a little too guilty to feel secure in that. Shiro coaxed Matt away, and Nyma and Keith seemed to be mutually attempting to bully each other to sleep (and mutually failing, at that.)

Meri left before Allura had finished trying to resolve that dispute. She knew Allura's attention would turn her way, next, and she wasn't in the mood to deflect just now.

So she left, ducking into the castle rather than venture out into the sprawling underground base that was entirely too sterile, entirely too foreign, and just close enough to the halls of the _Eryth_ to make Meri's skin crawl. The castle was quieter, but the oppressive aura that Keturah's presence had brought had fully dispersed by now, and Meri would take mildly haunting to actively triggering any day.

Coran had still been below when Meri made her escape, probably lurking and waiting for a chance to spring on Allura and force _her_ to sleep--and blissfully unaware that Allura was going to shove him in a cryopod herself if he didn’t go willingly. It was anyone’s guess which one of them would come out on top, but whoever it was was sure to come hunting for Meri next.

That meant she would have to be quick.

She stole up to the bridge, taking a seat at Pidge's station and opening up the folders of files Meri herself had sent them. She'd hoped to bring more home with her, but she'd lost her data chip somewhere during the furor of her discovery and subsequent escape. She hesitated, staring at the file list and trying to dredge up anything she might have read in the last batch of files, but she'd simply been in too much of a hurry, grabbing anything and everything she could get her hands on as she prepared to leave once and for all.

With a sigh, she began delving in. She'd see how much she had, and maybe she'd pass it along to Ulaz, see what he could get out of it. She hadn't been able to land him a spot in Vindication as she'd hoped, but he and Dez should be able to dredge up _something_ more, especially once they understood the urgency of the situation.

Besides, she needed to warn them. Keturah had been inside Meri's head, and though she didn't know for sure that she'd found anything about Dez or Ulaz, she couldn't take that risk when both their lives were on the line.

* * *

"I just don't understand," Allura said. "How long was Keturah planning her betrayal?"

Shiro looked up from the console where he'd begun to go through messages from allied systems. A staggering number of distress calls had come in over the course of the last three days--far more than their allies in the Coalition could handle without Voltron and the Guard to back them up.

"What do you mean?" Shiro asked.

Allura stood at one of the peripheral stations, reviewing the last of the maintenance checks submitted by Coran's engineering crew. No one had had quite enough rest since the battle, but everyone had _slept_ , at least for a short time, and sooner or later they were going to have to get back out there.

Allura was slow to respond--distracted by the reports or by her own thoughts, Shiro wasn't certain. "Keturah's AI. The last time she underwent a memory transfer was nearly a full year before her supposed death. So for the AI to have replicated her betrayal, she must have been planning it for a long, _long_ time."

“Actually...” Shiro stared at the latest distress call in the queue for a long moment, then switched his screen off and gave his full attention to Allura. “Keith and I were talking. About… about what he saw of the confrontation between Keturah and Lealle.”

Allura swallowed, her arms wrapping around her waist. “Oh?” she asked in a small voice. “What did he say?”

“Keturah claimed not to remember why she did what she did ten thousand years ago. I don’t know how far we can trust what she said, but she may not have decided to betray you until that last year.”

“Then why take over the castle-ship now?”

Coran's head popped out of the hatch in the floor leading to the computer core. "I might have an answer for that."

Shiro paused, looking first to Allura, and then to Coran. "Really?"

For a moment, Coran looked like he was regretting having said anything. Then he sighed, waved them over, and dropped back through the hatch. Shiro followed, though part of him was reluctant to do so. He'd been to the computer core only a handful of times, so most of his memories of it were borrowed from Allura--times she'd gone to visit her mother, both before and after her ten thousand-year nap.

It was a haunting room, for all Coran insisted it was just a really big computer. Computers on Earth didn't glow like a hundred nebulae in glass cases. Computers on Earth didn't give you the feeling that they knew you were there.

Coran had already finished cleaning up the broken glass from Lealle and Keturah's cylinders, so if Shiro hadn't known what had happened, he wouldn't have even noticed there was a problem. The paladins' cylinders were lined up along the outsides of the room, one line for each lion, with empty pedestals waiting for future additions.

Shiro's eyes went to the wall where the line of cylinders each had a band of green embedded around the crown. "Hey, Coran?"

"Yes?"

"Will we..." He tore his eyes away from the cylinders. "...Ryner was building a memory profile."

Allura gave Coran a sharp look, which told Shiro she'd already thought about this, and had spoken with Coran about it. Ryner was gone, but did that mean they'd lost all of her? It might help Pidge to be able to talk to her again--not right now, maybe, but after they'd had a little while to grieve.

But Coran only sighed, his shoulders slumping. "She was, yes." He turned, sorrow in his eyes as he met Shiro's gaze. "But she took my advice to begin with short segments, and she and Pidge were both so busy with their search that she didn't make it back to the castle very often... I'm afraid she didn't get far enough in her profile for it to be viable."

"We were trying to figure out how to tell Pidge," Allura admitted. "And when it would be appropriate to do so."

Running his fingers through his hair, Shiro nodded. "I'll talk with Matt and Karen about it. As far as I know, no one else has seen Pidge since they got back." It was another problem Shiro couldn't solve, and it dragged at him. Pidge had been shut up in their room on the castle-ship for nearly two days now. Karen and Matt brought them food, so Shiro knew they were eating, but that was _all_ he knew.

Coran patted his arm, but continued in the direction he'd been going before the interruption, leading them back to the red paladin line. "I noticed something while I was cleaning up," he said, clicking on a penlight and shining it on the base of what had been Keturah's cylinder. "See here?"

Shiro crouched to get a better look, Allura steadying herself on his shoulder as she did the same. Coran had the light pointed at a thin, flexible tube that came out of the back of the base. It looked like a power cord to Shiro's eye.

There was a tiny hole in the tube, so small Shiro wouldn't have seen it even with Coran pointing it out, except that the tube around it was discolored, a thin stripe curving down toward the ground as though something had leaked out and bleached the casing. "What is this?" Shiro asked.

"Quintessence supply. The memory lattice is Quintessence-based, but it's too delicate for ordinary crystals or the Quintessence you'd find in Q-conduit. We keep special supplies behind the walls here and feed it into the cylinders at a steady rate."

Shiro frowned at the cord. "And you think it was tampered with?"

"I think Haggar added some of her own Quintessence to the mix, creating a link between herself and her AI.”

“A link?” Shiro’s mouth ran dry. “So, what? The AI was a mix of the old Keturah and Haggar?” It would cast the last few days in a new light, if that were the case. Like the fact that Keturah had killed less than a tenth of the people on the castle when she’d taken control, when she could have easily suffocated them all in the first few minutes. He’d been wracking his mind trying to figure out why. Had she been planning on ransoming them, trading civilians for the lions, or for the paladins’ surrender? Perhaps she’d wanted them for one of her research projects, though surely there was no shortage of prisoners for her to choose from.

But if part of her had still been Keturah the paladin--loyal to her team and not yet the monster Shiro knew…

Truth be told, he couldn’t conceive of a Keturah who knew mercy, but she’d been one of Allura, Meri, and Coran’s closest friends, once, so perhaps it wasn’t as impossible as it seemed. Perhaps her AI still had the capacity to regret what she'd become. He wasn’t sure if the suggestion would comfort Allura or only upset her more, though, so he opted not to voice it.

Coran pressed his lips together. “I’m afraid there are a lot of things I don’t know. She’s learned to do things with Quintessence I never would have thought possible, so if she did manage to create a Quintessence bridge with her AI...” He shook his head. “The thing is, I haven't the faintest idea _when_ she could have managed it."

"Merkul," Allura said. When this statement was met with only silence, she looked up. "It must be. You remember the day Keith and Matt discovered they could copilot the Red Lion? You remember the drone that got in here? We thought it was trying to cut power to the main computers, but what if that was only a diversion?" Allura reached out for the cord, twisting it so the puncture mark better caught the light. "The system should have flagged a problem with this flow. But if the computers were offline at the time..."

Shiro stood, shaking his head. "But Merkul was--"

"More than a year ago?" Allura looked up at him, her smile grim. " _Long_ before we realized there was a spy in our midst? She had to play it safe, at first, of course. Aside from Coran, everyone on the castle was a paladin." She paused. "Though I suppose we hadn't realized that about Shay, yet. But we would have known it wasn't one of us. Keturah only grew bold once we'd welcomed dozens of strangers aboard."

"Damn." Shiro straightened, his head spinning with the revelation. "And she was watching us all that time?"

"One can only assume." Coran spread his arms, looking as helpless as Shiro felt. "Considering who’s behind it all, I’m not sure we’ll ever have all the answers."

"Meri doesn't have any insights?"

Shiro knew at once that he'd stepped on a landmine with that question. Allura stiffened, and Coran's eyes lingered on her while he composed his response. "We... haven't had a chance to speak with her about it." He stroked his mustache, his gaze sliding away. "She's made herself quite scarce these last few days..."

* * *

"You're hiding, aren't you?"

Meri jumped, and Akira almost managed to feel bad about sneaking up on her. Except that he hadn't really snuck up on her at all. He'd just happened to find her, lost in thought, alone, in a lonely corner of the castle-ship that no one in their right mind ever bothered to visit.

And, no, he didn't know what he was doing out here. He'd needed to clear his head, and it had seemed like a good place to go for a walk. It was only when he'd stumbled upon Meri here in a small hydroponic garden in Green Tower that he'd stopped to consider that maybe he wasn't wandering around for his own sake, after all.

Meri glared at him, leaning back against a planter, her fingers curling around the lip of it. "I'm _not._ "

Akira arched an eyebrow.

In response, she flung and arm out to encompass the garden. "Do _you_ see anyone else taking care of this place? Cause I sure don't."

Frowning, Akira looked around. True, this place was abandoned, aside from the two of them. He'd figured that was the point. Some forgotten little spot tucked away in the labyrinthine halls of the castle-ship, somewhere no one would think to look for her. That wouldn't exactly work if there were people around to tattle on her.

"What is this place?"

"Garden," Meri said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug.

"Thanks. I never would have guessed from all the plants and shit."

She cracked a smile at that, but it was short-lived. "Hyrdoponics. Best way to maintain a garden in deep space and better than dehydraded for the kitchens. It's been here as long as I can remember, but Ryner's the one who got it up and running again."

The bottom dropped out of Akira's stomach. "Oh..."

"Yeah. I mean, there's a whole staff, now. Paladins have too much to do to be farmers, too. But they're all recovering from the whole shitshow with Keturah, so I can't really blame them for not wanting to hang around here right now. I just figured someone should come make sure nothing dies."

She turned back to her work, pruning overgrown plants, picking berries and nuts, taking samples of the water solution flowing through the rows of planters. Akira watched her work for a few minutes, then finally stepped forward, rolling up his sleeves. "How can I help?"

She stared at him, plainly searching for a trick, then shrugged and put him to work. Akira had never been much of a gardener. No one in his family had been, really, and Akira had seen no reason to break new ground. It was oddly soothing, though. Working quietly, side by side with Meri, the sound of running water pleasantly muted by the greenery all around.

"The others worry about you, you know," he said.

Meri snorted. "Why do you think I'm out here? They've got bigger things to do than angst about my hurt feelings, you know? I'm trying not to be too needy."

"You know you don't _always_ have to be the one coming to the rescue, right?"

She elbowed him in the ribs, a smile playing at her lips. "I know, okay? I just..." Her smile faltered, and she stared at the plant she was tending to. "I'm not ready."

And Akira got that. He did. There were still things Takashi wasn't ready to share. There were still things that shook him, brought him close to his breaking point, and Akira had learned when not to push.

So he didn't.

They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, Meri slowly relaxing as she realized Akira wasn't going to try to corner her. He searched for something innocuous to talk about, but it seemed everything was tainted--by Ryner's death, by Keturah's betrayal, by the truth of Vindication and the fate of so many of the paladins' families...

“So Allura’s been teaching me Castle’s Flight.”

Meri cocked her head to the side. “Yeah? How’s that going?”

He wiggled a hand. “Meh. You know what’s going _great_ , though?”

“What?”

“Red teaching me to cheat.”

Meri laughed, surprised and delighted. “You _didn’t!_ Against Allura?”

“I wasn’t gonna win any other way.”

“And how pissed was she when she found out?”

Akira grinned. “Not at all. I just had to frame it as training. ‘Strengthening my bond with my lion.’”

“Sneaky little bastard, aren’t you?”

“Aw, c’mon, Naomi. You know you love me for it.”

Meri went suddenly quiet, the motion of her hands slowing. "Naomi?"

Akira bit his lip, flipping a leaf back and forth between his fingers. "That's how you first introduced yourself to me, remember?" He tried to make his tone light and teasing, but there was a hesitancy there that they could both feel.

"A lie," she said.

He tipped his head to the side. "It some ways. But that's the thing about you--you've always been able to put on these faces, take on these other names, but it doesn't change who you are. I mean, come on. ‘Naomi’ worked for the Garrison. She was part of Iverson's inner circle. She should have been this cold, calculating bitch--and maybe to other people, that's exactly how you made yourself seem. But Naomi was the person who saved my life, who nerded out with Eli about alien abductions and conspiracy theories--"

"There was nothing theoretical about it, and you know it, Shirogane."

Akira grinned. "Conspiracy realities, then.” He waved a hand, letting the silence stretch as he weighed his next words. “Meri, Naomi, Lena-- Whatever you call yourself, you can't change who you are."

She smiled, a faint sheen of tears misting her eyes, and she shoved him again, still muttering about the conspiracy theory accusation, but her face had softened, her shoulders slumping with something like relief.

"I don't have to call you Naomi if it makes you uncomfortable," he said, bumping his shoulder against hers. "I'm just teasing."

She bumped him back, then laid her head against his shoulder. "It's fine. I don't mind."

He smiled, put an arm around her shoulders, and kissed the crown of her head. "Okay, then. Naomi it is."

* * *

The days crept by. Civilians moved back into the castle, a trickle that began with the paladins' families. Some chose to stay behind, and Coran couldn't blame them, although to him even New Altea didn't feel safe any longer. There was a long road ahead of these people, beginning with the frantic repairs on the planetary rings. They had, at last, patched the vulnerability in the system that maintained the exclusionary zone that blocked wormholes and other forms of FTL travel in the vicinity, so they would have some warning if Zarkon tried to take advantage of their pain.

The paladins had begun to prepare for departure. The war waited for no one, after all, and they couldn't afford too long a recovery, however much they all needed it.

Not that anyone minded the rush back into action. Sam Holt, Rolo, Rax, and now Zuza had been taken, twisted--family and friends to the paladins. Even those who hadn't lost family of their own to Keturah's machinations couldn't make themselves sit back when their family's family was on the pyre.

And Coran couldn't blame them. He pushed and prodded for rest wherever he could tease it out of the paladins, but with Pidge still shut away in their room, refusing all visitors except Karen and Matt--with the two of them ghosts of themselves, with Shay faint and rattled, with Nyma always on the verge of an explosion that crackled in Coran's chest in sympathy… Rest was in short supply.

Once they were out among it once more, once they felt as though they were making progress instead of being stuck here, far from the worst of the atrocities, perhaps it would be better. More work to be done, but perhaps more willingness to breathe when the chance presented itself. Coran could only hope.

In the mean time, he focused his efforts where they would do some actual good. They all did. Karen hovered at Matt's shoulder whenever she wasn't visiting Pidge; the Kahales rallied around Hunk and Shay and busied themselves in the kitchens during every spare moment; Rosario hunted Keith down, the very first day she returned to the castle-ship, to thank him for saving her daughter. And if Keith was flustered by her heartfelt gratitude, then he was utterly powerless to refuse her plea to take care of himself, to perhaps spend the evening with the whole Mendoza family.

And Coran... Coran reached out in small ways, here and there, to each of his Blues. Teasing Lance into a game of _eshet_ when the helplessness started to spiral, sparring with Nyma when he felt the emotions building inside her, tracking down Val with a mug of tea and the offer of a hug when the desperation threatened to strangle her, setting Meri to tasks that didn't need doing, but that gave her something to distract her anxious mind.

...And trying to find a moment to speak with Wyn in private.

* * *

_Are you sure you're ready for this?_

Rowan managed not to laugh in Wyn's face, but it was a close thing. _No,_  he said, _but putting it off isn't doing any good._

Wyn was skeptical, Rowan knew. It had taken nearly a full day after returning to New Altea for Wyn to resurface, and even then he'd been skittish, fuzzing out of focus whenever Rowan skirted too near sensitive topics. So he only knew a fraction of what had happened--he certainly didn't understand why Rowan had suddenly decided to come clean.

Coran knew. Maybe not everything, and maybe he'd be able to set his suspicions aside if Rowan doubled down and made sure to pass flawlessly from now on--but he'd seen through Rowan's act once. At _best_ , he would be worried on Wyn's behalf. At worse, he would start to doubt whether Wyn could really be trusted. In light of Keturah's betrayal, the second was more likely, and even if Coran gave them the benefit of the doubt, assumed that Wyn had no malicious intent and was merely the victim of another one of Haggar's plots, it would still hurt Wyn in the end.

(It was easier, somehow, if he told himself this was best for Wyn. It was easier if he didn't let himself think about what it would be like to be _himself_  for once. He wasn't that selfish. Was he?)

Wyn had tried to tell Rowan he was imagining things, but Coran _did_  know something was wrong. He had to. Why else would he bring Rowan to the archives today under the pretense of checking their integrity? Coran and his crew had had plenty of time to check the castle for lingering signs of Keturah's influence, and they had faster, more accurate ways to do so than two people flipping through old files at random. Clearly this entire thing was a farce designed to get them away from prying eyes and listening ears.

But waiting for Coran to work himself up to a confrontation was wearing on Rowan's nerves and so, though he most certainly was _not_  ready to spill the closely-guarded secret of his own existence, he finally decided to rip the bandage off.

"Coran, I need to apologize."

Coran lowered the tablet he'd been staring at and shifted his attention to Rowan. They sat across from each other in plush chairs in the archive room's small reading alcove, a few feet between them--close enough to feel intimate, but far enough not to be crowding. "Aplogize?" Coran asked. "For what?"

Rowan set his tablet on the table beside his chair and pulled his feet up onto the cushion. Wyn hovered anxiously at the corner of his mind, watchful and wary but staying out of the way. He wasn't totally on board with what was happening, but he wasn't stopping it, either. Rowan wasn't sure if that was because he trusted Rowan or just that he felt guilty for being the only one who got to wear his own face and use his own name with anyone except his headmates.

The prickle on the back of Rowan's neck told him Wyn wasn't the only one watching, but unless and until Eran decided to join the conversation, Rowan couldn't afford to worry about him.

"I've been lying to you," Rowan said. He couldn't make himself meet Coran's eyes, so he just closed his own and forced himself to keep speaking. It was harder than it would have been if he'd been mimicking Wyn. Mimicking Wyn was his job, and it had become second nature over the years. But these were Rowan's own words, and words had always been hard for him. "I know you've noticed, even if you don't know exactly what it means."

Coran breathed in, set his own tablet aside, and leaned his elbows on his knees. "Are you talking about what happened while Keturah had control of the castle?"

Rowan nodded, his stomach curdling. He could feel himself trying to disappear back inside, to force Wyn or Leth to take control. He didn't want to be having this conversation. No--he wanted to have this conversation, in theory, but he didn't want to have to deal with the aftermath, whatever that happened to be.

"I thought there might be more going on than you let on," Coran said slowly, "but I'm afraid I couldn't figure out more than that. Is everything all right?"

Rowan shook his head, curling his hands around his shins until his fingertips dug painful furrows in his legs.

"Wyn?"

"I'm not Wyn." As soon as the words were out, Rowan wanted to take them back. What had he been thinking? He couldn't undo this, couldn't explain it all away and pretend he hadn't said anything. Maybe Wyn was right. Maybe he should have waited.

"It's all right. All right? Just breathe with me."

Rowan opened his eyes to find Coran crouched beside his chair--holding back, still not crowding, but clearly worried. _Worried_ , not afraid. Not disgusted.

He didn't understand.

"Have you ever heard of _ul_ _syncrea_?" Rowan whispered, his voice rasping as his mouth ran dry.

Coran stilled, and Rowan knew at once that he knew. "I've heard of it," Coran admitted. "Though I won't pretend to be an expert."

Rowan nodded, the motion a little nauseating as he found himself floating out of himself, floating an inch above the ground, a split second removed from the actions of his body. "I've got some articles you can read that explain it pretty well, if you'd like."

Coran nodded, offering Rowan a small smile. "I'd like that very much. But first, if you're not Wyn, is there something else I can call you?"

"I mean--" Rowan wetted dry lips, curling tighter on himself. "It's usually Wyn you're talking to. He's our host, so-- It's fine if you call me Wyn. I'm used to it by now."

Coran was silent for a long moment following this, and slowly Rowan realized he was waiting. He wasn't pushing, wasn't demanding an answer. Just--listening. Giving Rowan a chance to say as much or as little as he wanted.

Slowly, Rowan lifted his gaze to meet Coran's, and his eyes welled when he realized Coran was looking at him just the same way he'd always looked at Wyn--with kindness, with patience.

"Rowan."

Coran smiled. "Thank you for confiding in me, Rowan. Is it all right if I hug you?"

Rowan nodded, numb, as Wyn's joy burst like fireworks at the fringes of his awareness. Somewhere even more distantly was a twinge of--something. Pain-surprise-longing-resentment that could only have been Eran, and maybe Rowan would have to make that his next priority, once he was feeling brave again. For now, though, he just leaned into Coran as his skin crawled, his heart pounded, and his head spun.

The shape of his own name still hung in the air, a foreign and thrilling thing, and he smiled--a little bashful, a little exhilarated--as Coran held him. It was a wonderful thing, being seen, and just for this moment he let himself revel in it.

* * *

Rolo ached.

His head throbbed, making it hard to think of anything except the pain, the heat, and the way the room swayed and spun around him. He was sick. He thought he was. Feverish and achy and foggy from drowsing all day without really finding rest. Somewhere, distantly, Beezer chirped a question, and Nyma grunted in response. Rolo didn't remember her taking care of him, but she must have, and sacrificed sleep to do so. No wonder she was in a sour mood.

Rough hands, cool to the touch, brushed up against either side of his head, and a heat followed. It was a deep warmth, and it chased away the fog, if not the aches that plagued the rest of his body.

Groaning, he opened his eyes to find Rax leaning over him, his eyes closed and his hands glowing with the blue aura of Quintessence.

Right.

The cell.

Rolo squeezed his eyes shut, chasing the echo of his dreams. He'd much rather be on the _Harbinger_ right now, sick or otherwise, but he couldn't call to mind the sound of Nyma's laugh or the particular way Beezer had of buzzing when he was up to no good. It had been so long since Rolo had seen either of them that it was getting hard to remember the finer details of what made them _them._

"Rolo? Are you well?"

Rolo breathed out, quashing his disappointment before he opened his eyes again. Rax sounded tired and pained enough without Rolo making it worse. "I'm alive," he said at length, accepting Rax's help and sitting up. His head spun, throbbing again with a headache so overpowering Rolo would have thought he'd hit his head on something.

Hell, maybe he had. He knew he'd been taken from the cell, down to an unfamiliar lab. It wasn't just that he didn't recognize the equipment, though he didn't. The entire space felt wrong. Sterile. Foreign.

This cell was different, too, now that he cared to notice. He wouldn't call it clean, but it was cleaner than the place they'd been kept ever since he was captured. It didn't look like this cell had been in use for very long. "That's right," he muttered. "They transferred us. Wonder why?"

Rax obviously didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't bother to reply. Instead, he retreated to sit against the wall, squinting against the low light and lifting one hand to massage his forehead. Apparently Rolo wasn't the only one with a hangover.

"Do you know what they did to us? I don't remember anything after..."

_The lab, gleaming and pristine. A muted commotion, a buzz of anticipation in the air. Hands wrestling him onto a table, face down, and a pinch at the base of his skull._

"I caught only flashes," Rax said. His tone instantly set Rolo on edge. "They connected me to that creature... the robeast." He bowed his head, his shoulders rising toward his ears. "It was a slaughter."

Awareness prickled at the corners of Rolo's mind--not quite memory, but a kind of familiarity. There had been a battle. Rolo was there, but not fully. The Sentinel had consumed him, cocooning him in quiet expectation, in observation, in _hunger._ It was aware of the fighting, but Rolo was only aware of the thrill coursing through a mind adjacent to his own.

His stomach curdled, and he dropped his head between his knees, breathing through the nausea. The robeast, the rampant emotions that were too much for his mind to comprehend... It all painted a picture that didn't need details to be horrifying. The druids had succeeded in what they'd set out to do. Rolo was their weapon now.

Was this what they'd done to Sam? Was this where he'd gone, and why he'd never returned? But if so, why were Rax and Rolo both here now?

Rolo knew he wouldn't have liked the answers to his questions, but not knowing was worse, and it was another two days before anything changed. Two full days of aches and fatigue. He couldn't even step outside himself in that time. It was like he'd strained a muscle. He was still _capable_ of willful separation; he was certain of it. But it hurt, and it was difficult to convince himself that it was worth the effort.

Late on the second day, the cell door finally opened, and the guards led Sam in. Thin, pale, and silent, Sam hardly seemed himself, and Rolo held his breath as he held himself back from running to Sam's side at once. There was no fight left in Sam; the guards didn't need to shove him forward or threaten him with violence to get him to comply. He simply walked in, crossed to the far corner of the cell, and sat, head bowed, as the guards closed the door and retreated.

The instant they were alone, Rolo scrambled to Sam's side, Rax not far behind.

"Sam? _Vrekt_ , Sam, we thought you were--"

He couldn't even finish the thought. He'd never let himself say it, not even inside his own head. The idea that Sam could be dead had been too overwhelming, and he'd been afraid that even allowing for the possibility would crush him.

Now he was back, and Rolo shook with the realization of how close he'd come to losing one of the few people in the universe he could call family.

Sam looked up at him, silent, and tears filled his eyes. In the next instant, his body went limp, and Rolo cursed as he caught him, settling him against the wall so he wouldn't hurt himself. He glanced to Rax. "Moment of truth," he said with a wry smile. Rax only nodded. He'd never separated from himself at will before, and truth be told, Rolo had had to have it done to him a dozen times before he figured out the trick.

The druids were moving more quickly with Rax, though, separating him only twice before they linked him to his robeast. He didn't have time to get used to the phenomenon. Rolo only hoped his control over Quintessence would give him a little bit of an advantage over Rolo and Sam in this regard.

The ache was still there when Rolo stepped out of himself, and if not for Sam's presence, a faint glow on the verge of sight, Rolo probably would have given up the effort. He strained, though, and hissed as he ripped himself free.

Sam stood in the center of the room, his back to Rolo, but Rolo had hardly solidified before Sam flickered and disappeared. Rolo grabbed Rax's arm as his form--nebulous and faint--coalesced at Rolo's side.

"Congrats," he said. "Try to relax."

Rolo stepped forward, skimming across the physical world with all his mind focused on Sam. It was harder to follow him than to go to a specific location, but they'd ventured out together often enough for Rolo to slip into Sam's wake and to drag Rax along behind him.

They stopped outside. It was dark, and for a moment Rolo could have mistaken it for the barren asteroid the last base had been located on. But the rock was redder here, and tiny scraggly plants grew between the stones. A planet, then, or one of the rare living moons. It was every bit as quiet as the asteroid, at any rate.

Sam stood a few feet away, stiff and silent. Rolo didn't have to see his face to feel the pain radiating off him.

"Something happened," Rax said, not quite a question.

Sam turned, blinking at Rax before turning to Rolo. "How long was I gone?"

"Week or two," Rolo said. "Someone's lit a fire beneath the druids' asses. They aren't taking their time anymore." He could have told Sam about the latest excursion, the slaughter Rolo and Rax had both, evidently, been used for. But Sam was running from demons tonight, and Rolo wouldn't be party to burying that down where it could fester and eat away at Sam, safely out of sight of his companions. "We thought you were dead."

"I should be." The stone closed over Sam's face again, blotting out the pain, and the fear, and the guilt, but it was crumbling, and he opened his mouth, hesitating over his next words. "They sent me out again, in the robeast. The... lion. But they took it further this time. I wasn't just connected to it. They took control of _me_. Outfitted me with armor and weapons. They made me fight Pidge."

Rolo took his arm, stopping him before he could run off again. Sam had been devastated the first time they sent him against Pidge, but this was something on an entirely different level. This was Sam tearing apart at the seams, a wild look in his eye and a hollow note in his words. This was Sam barely holding it together.

"You didn't see them," Sam whispered. "They knew I could kill them. They knew I _would_. I couldn't stop myself. I tried, but they'd locked me out. All I could do was watch. And they were so scared. They were scared _of me._ "

"No," Rolo said, compacting his horror into conviction. "They were scared of what the druids did to you. They know it's not you, Sam. You would never hurt them. _I_ know that, and I've only known you for a year. Your kid won't buy the druids' trick for a second."

Sam shook his head. His form flickered, and he stepped out of Rolo's grip. He was fuzzing around the edges, and for an instant, Rolo thought he would let himself go. Drift away, disperse, as Rolo nearly had the first time he was torn from his body.

"The woman who was with them," Sam whispered, wide eyes staring at Rolo. "The other green paladin. Pidge's friend... I killed her."

* * *

Sam held on. By some miracle, he held on. Rolo and Rax kept close to him at all times, offering what comfort and distraction they could. It was strange, to be the one offering comfort when always before, Sam had been the rock in the cell. Rolo wouldn't have survived his first few weeks without Sam's steadying presence.

He didn't think his comfort was as effective as Sam's, but he would offer it anyway. Anything for the man who had become a father to the both of them.

The guilt hung over Sam through the night and into the next day, smothering conversation, stifling Rolo's attempts to be optimistic.

Then a fourth prisoner joined their little family--a Galra girl who couldn't have been older than twenty. She'd been beaten, and she cowered away from the guards that dragged her to the cell and shoved her to the ground.

"Try not to get too attached," one of the guards said, laughter in his voice as the girl curled around herself. She didn't let out so much as a whimper, though it was obvious she was in pain. Rolo, who was the closest to her, laid a hand on her arm and glared at the guards, daring them to try something. Instead, the guard only smiled. "I don't think this one's up to Decora's standards."

"I give her a week," the other guard said. As they withdrew, the first guard laughed.

"A week? She'll be lucky if she makes it through her next session."

It was a good thing the door was closed, otherwise Rolo might have thrown himself at the guards, never mind the fact that he knew it would only end in new bruises and a lecture from Rax.

He placated himself by helping the girl to sit up, taking her weight as her wounds twinged. Rax hovered nearby--wary, but not hostile as he'd been when Rolo first met him. The newcomer was a Galra, but she obviously was no friend of the Empire. Sam, too, had sat up, drawing close to Rolo while leaving the girl room to breathe.

"Sorry about the cold welcome," Rolo said, forcing a smile into his voice. "These Imperials just don't know the meaning of hospitality."

She laughed, the sound a little bit choked, and Rolo rubbed her back.

"You're them, aren't you?"

"Them?" Sam asked.

"The ones the paladins are looking for. Didn't realize they had you all together, but I guess it makes sense. Prob'ly why she wanted Luz, too." She breathed out a sigh and slumped back against the wall. "Sorry, I should start at the beginning. I'm Zuza."

"Rolo. But it sounds like you already knew that."

Zuza grinned, tired and sore, but shining with a spark the druids hadn't yet managed to douse. "You have no idea."


	5. Ripples

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... The team's been reunited and returned to New Altea for rest while the castle and lions are repaired. Rowan introduced himself to Coran, Pidge withdrew from the rest of the team, Nyma figured out Haggar's plan for Dark Voltron, and Zuza joined the other subjects of Vindication in their cell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Grief and mourning, primarily in the first scene.

Pidge stared at their screen, the light so bright in the darkness of their room that it stung their eyes.

It gave them an excuse for the tears that blurred their vision, if nothing else.

Their code stared back at them. The code they’d written hastily before going back for their dad, the one meant to break Haggar’s control over him so they could bring him home. They knew they’d rushed it. Untested, probably buggy as fuck, maybe broken on some deeper level… they’d had every reason to believe it wouldn’t work, but they’d tried it anyway. They’d been so desperate to get their dad back that they hadn’t let themself see the many (many, _many_ ) flaws in their plan.

They were going back through it now, trying to figure out where they’d gone wrong. Were they at least on the right track? They had time now to iron out the bugs, if the program stood a chance of working once it was fixed. Maybe it would be better if they scrapped the whole thing and started over.

...It would help if they could even make _sense_ of what they were staring at.

They tried to tell themself it was exhaustion--then _and_ now. They’d been tired, desperate, and rushed when they wrote this program, so they’d probably made some very bizarre leaps in logic. Things had made sense at the time only because of the state Pidge had been in. And lately it seemed they couldn’t sleep enough. They were always tired, their head always foggy and heavy, and they couldn’t make themself focus on anything for long. A few more days, and they’d be back at the top of their game.

(They didn’t believe that.)

It wasn’t just this code, for one thing. After staring at it on and off for two days, they’d pulled up some of their other projects--ongoing and finished. Everything they’d worked on since becoming a paladin. Upgrades for the Lions, search protocols to crack open Imperial records, programs to watch for signs of tampering in the castle’s computer system (for all the good _that_ had done.)

None of it made sense. It was like staring at someone else’s code--someone else’s code that had been written in a language Pidge didn’t know. Individual lines made sense, more or less. They recognized the formatting here, the command they’d used there. Sometimes they could even string a few lines together and figure out what an entire section was meant to do.

Other times, they might as well have been reading Russian.

It wasn’t until they got to their very first files that they realized what was happening. (They remembered having such a hard time programming things at first, writing it all the only way they knew how and then trying to find ways to make it mimic the language the Empire used. Working with Green to try to compromise between the only programming languages Pidge knew and the language that made up Green’s core.)

Because, see, those early files made sense. They had no trouble seeing what they’d intended and how they’d gone about doing it, and here and there they even spotted places where they might have improved the code, though they couldn’t motivate themself to make note of it, much less fix it right now.

It was around the time Ryner joined the team that things started making less sense. Just a little bit here and there--pointers she’d given them. Tips and tricks they probably hadn’t fully understood even in the moment. But then it was a little more, and a little more…

She had been awfully quick to pick up human programming languages.

Pidge remembered, distantly, with the sensation of free-fall tightening around their throat, a conversation they’d once had with her. Olkari technicians worked all across the universe in their prime, fixing and modifying the tech of a thousand different species. They’d learned programming languages from most of these cultures, integrated it with their own. And then, as with other forms of the Arts, they took it a step further, writing code that meshed with virtually any programming language in the universe because the code itself analyzed and adapted to the computer it was run on.

So of course these programs all appeared to use familiar code. That’s what the program had determined was the appropriate language to use on this device.

(Now that they thought about it, they remembered picking through the code of the universal translator, the original inspiration for Olkari universal coding. It was more like deja vu than a real memory, though--the awareness that it _had_ happened, and that they ought to have remembered it, in the absence of any real memories about the event.)

But Ryner was the one who know how universal coding worked. Pidge understood the concept, and they’d been able to follow Ryner’s train of thought on the subject, but when it came right down to it… they’d never _learned_ how to code like this. They’d skipped that step, simply tapping into Ryner’s experience and doing it that way. They hadn’t ever stopped to think about it, but…

Well, in a sense, none of this was their work. It was Ryner’s, and now that Ryner was gone, Pidge didn’t know what to do with any of it.

There was a knock at the door, and Pidge’s heart skipped a beat. They shut their laptop with a snap, twisted, and slid it down beside their bed, out of sight. It was pure reflex, but the simple truth was, they didn’t want anyone knowing that they’d started working on things again. Once they knew, they would pry, and Pidge didn’t have any answers to give.

“Pidge?” Matt poked his head in, the light of the hallway cutting through the gloom of Pidge’s bedroom. “Hey. It’s almost dinnertime. You up for joining us?”

It was a cautious question, careful not to push. Their mother pushed enough for the both of them, even if she did try to be gentle about it. She was worried. _Everyone_ was worried, probably. They’d all reeked of relief the one time Pidge had ventured out for dinner, at their mother’s insistence.

They’d hated every second of it. The way the conversation around them was so stilted, everyone trying to be positive for Pidge’s sake. No one teased them or bickered with them or laughed or even so much as mentioned the war, though it was painfully obvious that was all anyone was really thinking about. They were nearly ready to leave New Altea, and everyone was itching to get back into the action.

But no one wanted to offend Pidge, or to bring up touchy subjects, or to remind them that their partner, their co-paladin, the other half of their brain, was _dead._

All the silence only drove the point home, and Pidge had spent the entire meal on the verge of tears, picking at their food just to keep their mother from accusing them of not eating, and as soon as the first person left the table--Coran, off to check in with his engineers--Pidge took the out and shut themself back in their room. They hadn’t even let Matt in until the following afternoon.

So, yeah, he was being cautious. Pidge appreciated it, and they hated it.

“Not tonight, Matt,” they said, trying to sound exasperated and not like they were inches away from breaking down. “I’m tired.”

It was a patently ridiculous excuse. Even if Matt didn’t know exactly what they usually meant by that, they’d done almost nothing _but_ sleep for the last week. But he held up his hands and relented at once. “Okay. Some other time. Is... Would it be too much if I brought my dinner up here? We could put on a movie or something.”

Pidge almost said no. They _wanted_ to say no. They wanted to be left alone to pull their blanket over their head and stare at the wall as thoughts of Ryner and their dad and the war ran rampant in their head. They wanted to shut everyone and everything out until their brain finally went quiet for once and stopped replaying the memory of Ryner getting shot on endless loop. They already _knew_ they’d screwed up; they didn’t need the constant reminders.

But turning Matt away would only make him worry _more_ , and they knew the company would be a better distraction than their own dark thoughts, even if it didn’t feel like it.

“Sure,” they muttered, hunching their shoulders as Matt brightened.

“Great! Any requests--on the food or the movie?”

They shrugged. “Whatever you feel like is fine.”

He was back before Pidge could work up the energy to climb out of bed--to get dressed, to make the bed, anything. They hadn’t taken a shower in three days, which was also the last time they’d changed out of their pajamas. The room was rank by now--discarded dishes and half-eaten snacks piling up on the desk, despite there being a hatch in the wall two feet away that would have taken them back to the kitchens to be cleaned.

It all made Pidge flush when Matt reappeared with a case tucked under his arm and a platter of food hovering at his shoulder. He’d brought quite the array--popcorn and chips and cookies, but also an entire veggie tray, pasta with some sort of meat (probably nothing as tame as chicken or beef, but it was probably Hunk or his moms who had made it, and Pidge would trust their judgment) and several rolls.

Matt was probably just hoping that Pidge would eat _something_ if he brought them enough options.

And they did eat. They _tried._ Their appetite had been unpredictable at best for the last week, but at least today they weren’t queasy. That was about as much as they could hope for. So they ate, and they let Matt put an arm around their shoulders, and they stared at the movie Matt had chosen, even if it didn’t really hold their attention.

Eventually, Matt left, and Pidge curled up in bed--still unable to convince themself that a shower was worth the trouble, still turning over all the things they could have done different that might have ended with Ryner not dead.

They stared at the wall, and then they stared at the ceiling, and then for a while they clamped their pillow over their head, trying to shut out the thoughts and the light creeping under the door, and the low voices that drifted in from the other paladins' rooms. It was still early--relatively so--and though some of the others seemed to have retreated to their rooms for the night, they didn't seem to be ready to sleep.

The voices still reached Pidge even through the pillow, little whispers that tickled their ear and made the back of their neck itch. The others were probably just hanging out, talking about nothing. Maybe someone had put on a movie, or maybe Lance was doing facials. Maybe someone had asked Shiro or Allura about the missions they would face once they returned to the universe at large.

It still felt like they were all talking about Pidge. About how they'd gotten Ryner killed. About how they were still so close to falling apart. The team needed someone they could rely on. It was only a matter of time before they needed Voltron, and without Ryner, that meant they were going to need Pidge.

It had been ten days, and Pidge still hadn't gone to see Green.

They should do that.

It was nearly another hour before they convinced themself to go. The hall light had dimmed, and the voices petered out. Pidge didn't believe for a second that everyone was asleep, but at least they might not run into anyone in the halls.

They needed to do this before some emergency forced them to face reality.

Pidge grabbed their hoodie from the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed--all clean, and all folded at one point. They'd been meaning to put them away, but instead they'd just left them where they'd fallen when they’d kicked them off the bed the first night so they could sleep. They tugged the hoodie over their head, shoving their hands into the pocket before heading for the door. There they hesitated, staring out into the quiet hall, then tugged the hood up over their head for good measure.

There was no reason it should have felt like they were doing something wrong, but their nerves weren't in the mood for rationality. They jumped at every sound, scurrying for cover whenever they got a hint of someone coming their way. They just didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. They didn't want anyone to know if they screwed it up.

The walk down to Green's hangar seemed to take forever. Maybe that was the fear, which had them backtracking at every footstep and voice from up ahead. Maybe it was the memory, painfully fresh, of what flying her without Ryner had felt like. (It felt like being torn apart. It felt like bleeding out, like suffocating, like abscesses opening up inside them, growing with each beat of their heart, consuming them from the inside out.)

Even standing right outside the hangar door, they weren't sure they wanted to do this. They weren't ready. Maybe they never would be.

They opened the door anyway, and stepped inside--and the pain slammed into them at the same instant they crossed the threshold. They swayed on the spot, their lungs seizing in their chest, and the holes in their thoughts that had finally begun to seal, to close over just enough that they weren't constantly aware of how much of them had been ripped out with Ryner's death--they all burst open again. Static buzzed at the fringes of their vision, filled their ears, crawled across their skin like insects.

For a moment, Ryner stood beside them, and it was the two of them again, headed out to search for Pidge's father, or to liberate a prison, or...

The memories drained away, crumbling to dust faster as Pidge tried to chase them. That was how it went. Sometimes the past crowded in, too much and too vivid to process. Other times they couldn't remember anything about Ryner except her death, as though the year they'd spent together had burned when they'd buried her.

Gasping, Pidge stumbled backward, out of the hangar. Tears blurred their vision, and they couldn't draw in a full breath. Somewhere, a Lion was roaring, or purring, or screaming in sympathetic pain. The way Pidge's own breathing rattled in their ears, they didn't think it was an audible sound, that roar. It was just Green, sharing in Pidge's agony through the bond.

They ran. They could hardly see where they were going, couldn't have said where they wanted to be. Not their room; it was too claustrophobic, and there were too many people around who might have heard them fighting not to cry. Not here, either, and not anywhere else that might remind them of Green or of Ryner.

Wherever they were going, they didn't make it there. They turned a corner somewhere near the old formal banquet hall and ran into another body at full speed, knocking the wind out of themself as they ricocheted off and fell back against the wall.

"Sorry! Didn't see..." Val trailed off as she recognized Pidge, and Pidge promptly turned around, driving their thumbs into the corner of their eyes to try to stem the flow of tears. They breathed, hoping the tremble in the sound wasn't loud enough for Val to hear. "Pidge?"

Pidge's eyes burned again, and they hunched their shoulders, ready to make a run for it.

"Are you okay?"

"No," they said, the word ripped out of them like the broken pieces of their mind. They tried to laugh, tried to make it sound like they were just being cynical and sarcastic, like maybe they were a little more okay than they seemed.

All they managed to do was choke on their tears as Val pulled them into a hug. "Shh. Pidge, it's okay. Take your time. Try to breathe for me, all right?"

But Pidge couldn't breathe. They couldn't silence the endless loop of guilt and frustration bouncing around in their head. They should have stuck it out down in the hangar. It hadn't really been that bad, right? They'd just freaked out and ran because they didn't want to own up to the fact that Green was hurting because _Pidge_ had gotten Ryner killed.

"Hey. _Hey._ Take it easy."

"I can't _take it easy_. I have to fix this. I have to--"

Val rubbed their back as they stumbled over everything they had to do. They had to make things right with Green. They had to get their dad back. They had to be better so that no one else would ever get hurt because of them.

They hardly noticed when Val drew them into a nearby room--somewhere dark and dusty that made Pidge sneeze. Val turned on the flashlight on her phone and set it aside, but it didn't illuminate much of the room, and Pidge was too busy drowning in mortification to care where they were.

"I can't do it," they whispered, and hated how much of a relief it was to say the words out loud.

Then they remembered Val was there, and they wished they hadn't said anything at all. "Can't do what?" she asked.

Pidge shook their head, scrubbing at their tears. "Nothing. It doesn't matter."

"Of course it matters. I know you're hurting, Pidge, and I know none of us really knows what you're going through, but we're still here for you. Whatever you feel like you have to do, you don't need to do it alone."

"But I _do._ " Pidge drew their knees up to their chest. The weight of it all had built behind their sternum, and however quick and shallow they breathed, they couldn't lighten the pressure. "Ryner's _gone_ , Val. It's just me. We're about to dive back into the war, and you're going to need the Green Lion. I have to be ready for this. I have to get over it."

Val twisted, crushing them against her. "No, you don't. You can't rush yourself. You just lost someone who was tied to you in a way no one else is. That's--hell, Pidge, I can't imagine what that's like. You don't have to be _okay_ just because there are still battles to be fought. You should be able to take as much time as you need to mourn her."

"If I do that, then I'm only putting everyone else in danger." Pidge grasped at their bangs, a hollowness in their chest making it hard to remember to breathe. They wanted to puke, but there wouldn't even have been much to bring up. "This isn't about me."

"Pidge..." Val rubbed their back for a long moment, her choked voice making Pidge a little calmer. Like at least they weren't being unreasonable, getting upset over this. It wasn't _fair_ , and they hated that they were even thinking like that. They were a paladin, and this was war. They couldn't afford to be throwing a tantrum over what the universe did or didn't owe them.

"Maybe Mom was right," they muttered. "Maybe I shouldn't even be a paladin." They crossed their arms atop their knees and dropped their head into the crook of their elbow, too miserable to care that they sounded every bit like the child they'd fought so hard to prove they weren't. "I don't want to do this anymore."

"Then don't."

Val's voice was so matter of fact that it stopped Pidge's panic in its tracks. They lifted their head and stared at her, certain they must have heard wrong. " _What?_ "

"I said, don't. Allura and Shiro have always made it clear that no one _has_ to fight, just because the lions saw some potential. Any one of us could have stayed behind on Earth. Any one of us can walk away, and no one would think any less of them. So if you need to step back for a while--if you need to get out, for a little while or for good, _do it._ Your well-being comes first."

She didn't get it. Shiro and Allura had given them all an out last year, sure. That was when there were extra paladins for every Lion. When any of the humans staying behind-- _all_ of the humans staying behind--wouldn't have stopped the rest of them from forming Voltron. When Ryner could have carried on without Pidge at her side.

Now it was just Pidge, and they _couldn't_ sacrifice the entire universe just because they were hurting.

"Pidge. Listen to me." Val wiped a tear from their cheek and leaned her forehead against theirs. "I've already flown Green. We know she'll accept me, at least when you can't be there. From what Blue's been telling me, I think... I think I could even form Voltron from inside Green. I think our bond is strong enough for that. _You don't have to do this._ "

It was like a boulder had been sitting squarely atop their chest and Val's words had finally dislodged it. Pidge breathed, and it _ached_ , breathing like that. Like maybe, just maybe, the world wasn't ending.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Val said. "The Lions wanted to blur the lines. They wanted us to be interconnected. I think this is part of that."

The tears had started again sometime when Pidge wasn't paying attention. It was softer now, not a dam bursting but a slow release. The guilt was having a hard time keeping its hold on them when all they wanted to do was fall against Val and breathe out their gratitude.

"It doesn't have to be forever," Val promised them, like she knew the release ached as much as it soothed. "Take some time. Take as much time as you need. If you decide you want to come back, Green will still be waiting for you, but if you can't, then that's okay, too. Okay? Don't worry too much about it for right now. You just focus on you."

Pidge couldn't put their gratitude into words, so they just hugged her, their tears soaking into the sleeve of her shirt.

* * *

The journey to the edge of the exclusionary zone was a quiet one, anticipation hanging over the castle. Everyone knew they’d be right back in the middle of it all the second they cleared that invisible line. Shiro and Allura already had a queue of distress calls waiting for each of them, and Matt knew that Shiro, at least, was itching to shift the balance of the war. He was tired of always responding to disasters, always being on the defensive. He wanted to take the fight to Zarkon.

Hopefully they would get that chance soon. But their first duty was to the people of the Coalition and to the innocent worlds counting on Voltron for help. Shiro would be the first to say that, however much it frustrated him.

Meanwhile, Keith was anxious to reach open space for an entirely different reason. Fenna and the rest of the homeworld pilots--those who had survived the battle over New Altea--had hitched a ride with the castle to the edge of the exclusionary zone. They were eager to get home, afraid that they might soon be needed to defend against Zarkon’s retaliation.

No one had said anything, but Matt suspected they were eager to go, in part, because they didn’t feel welcome on New Altea. They were _asothra_ , after all.

Matt could have understood the wariness of New Altea’s council and some of its people--Fenna and the others were strangers, and they flew stolen Imperial craft, and after the recent attack, that would make anyone uncomfortable. But Matt knew their reception wouldn’t have been much different even if they’d come under different circumstances.

He’d heard Allura muttering about it as they readied for departure. The council had come to see them off, and Allura had returned from speaking with them looking like she was ready to take a detour to the training deck to rip a few gladiators’ heads off.

“I’m no different from those pilots,” she told Shiro in an undertone as they stood on the bridge awaiting liftoff. Matt was standing close enough to hear, but her words didn’t carry far. “But of course an Altean can’t be _asothra_. _Our_ integrity is beyond such questions. It’s not as though Keturah is responsible for far more heinous crimes than any Galra under her command, but do they want to hear that? Of course not!”

Shiro had patted her shoulder, and they’d all relaxed once they left New Altea behind.

All except Keith, that was. Matt didn’t think Fenna and the rest worshiped Keith quite as much as he seemed to expect--if anything, they seemed ready to collectively adopt him. Though Keith might have found the coddling as objectionable as the hero-worship.

In any case, Keith did his best to avoid them for the entire journey, only to venture down to the hangar that held their ships on the day they left in order to see them off.

“You sure you don’t want to go with them?” Matt asked. He’d tagged along in part to get his mind off Pidge and in part because he could tell that Keith cared about the homeworld more than he liked to admit.

Keith shook his head. “I’ve done what I can for the homeworld. I’m not going to get myself mixed up in politics just because Keena wants me to.”

“Don’t blame you,” Matt said. He left unspoken the part where he’d be the first to back Keith up if he ever _did_ want to make a return trip to the homeworld.

They could deal with that if it ever became an issue. For now, they had more pressing things to worry about. The universe had been without Voltron long enough.

* * *

"You're sure you're going to be all right?"

"I'll be fine, Meri," Val said, suppressing a smile. "I've flown Green before."

Meri went quiet, and Val remembered, suddenly, that Meri had first bonded with Blue shortly after Lealle's death. She would know, better than anyone else on the castle, what it was like--stepping off a ledge into a pit of pain, grief, guilt, and loneliness. Green had tried to hold it all back from Val, but the paladin bond didn't work like that. To fly her meant to feel her, even if all there was to feel was hurt.

"I'll be _fine,_ " Val repeated, refusing to let the doubt creep into her voice.

Meri wrinkled her nose anyway. "Maybe I should stay. Hunk and Shay don't really _need_ a translator--they got by just fine with Yellow. I should--"

" _Meri._ " Val laughed, Meri's fretting enough to make her forget the knot in her own stomach. " _Go._ I know you've been looking forward to seeing the free Balmera, and Hunk and Shay are excited to have you along. All I'm going to be doing is flying laps around the castle."

Meri didn't look totally convinced, but she crooked her mouth into a half-smile, flung her arms around Val's shoulders, and gave her a squeeze. "If you need me, you call. Okay? Doesn't matter how trivial it is."

Val snorted and squeezed Meri back. "I hope you know the same goes both ways."

The laugh Meri gave in response was too bright to feel quite natural, but Val let it go, for now. Everyone was hurting these days, and no one wanted to admit it. Meri was hardly unique in that regard, and Val was hardly the best one to be going out appointing herself therapist to other people.

But at least Meri was moving now, headed off for Yellow Tower, where Hunk and Shay were meeting her. Lance and Nyma would be in Blue by now, ostensibly to help Val with her training. She had a sneaking suspicion they were mostly coming along to make sure she didn't hurt herself.

Val took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and walked into Green's hangar. The pain of losing Ryner hung suspended in the air, like the room itself was holding its breath. It was distant--deliberately so, Val suspected. Green knew it had hurt Val to fly her before, and she was trying to make the second go-round easier. Val rolled her eyes and bustled forward. She refused to let this be awkward. She was a paladin, and Green had chosen her, and _Blue_ had chosen her for exactly this.

...Maybe not _exactly_ this. Val didn't think the lions chose their paladins with the death of their friends in mind. But she _was_ here to help, however she could, and right now what Pidge needed was someone to take their place.

"Hey," Val said, drumming her fingers on her helmet. It felt strange to be talking to a lion that wasn't Blue, and the answer Green gave was too vague to make much out. She couldn't say if it was because Green spoke in a different language than Blue, because Val's bond with Green wasn't as strong as her bond with Blue, or just because Green wasn't up to talking right now.

She pressed forward anyway, reaching up to pat Green's snout as she entered the cockpit.

"Okay, girl," she whispered, settling in behind the controls. "Let's do this."

* * *

The free Balmera was even more beautiful the second time around. Shay had begun to fear that she may have embellished its beauty in her mind, as captivated as she had been by the very notion of Balmerans who had never known the horrors of the Galra Empire.

But no. She felt it first as Yellow followed the call in her core--a vibration in her chest, a warmth, a swelling that threatened to lift her off her feet. Crystals and plants spread out below her as Yellow came in, and Meri breathed out in amazement that prickled on the edge of Yellow's song. She was not quite so much a part of the bond as Hunk or Yellow--not nearly enough for her to hear the song herself, but she need not have told them about the conversation she had had with the Lions in Blue's Heart. Shay would have known there was some connection between them from the moment Meri set foot in Yellow's cockpit.

Hunk sang a thrill of expectation, nearly as excited to be back as Shay was. They'd only just begun to make headway the last time they were here, before they received word of the attack on New Altea. Hardly a week had passed since then, but it felt like so much longer. So much had happened. So many people had died.

Coming back here, to somewhere almost untouched by war, was surreal. It was such a change from the devastation on New Altea--even passing the scar of the Vkullor attack on one of the other Balmera in this migration, it didn't feel so real. It was not an old wound, but from the air it may as well have been.

From the air, you couldn't see the broken lives, the broken homes.

They went to the Balmera where they'd been welcomed before, and Shay put the war and the Vkullor out of her mind.

Shay heard the Elders' welcome in the song, wordless and warm, and she answered in kind. It was difficult not to be ashamed of her clumsiness with the language of her people, though she knew these Balmerans did not blame her for what the Empire had stolen from her.

Curiosity mingled with the welcome, and the weight of countless minds turned Meri's way. Shay tried to explain Meri's presence--who she was, both to Voltron and to Shay, why she had come. She wasn't sure her meaning came across, which was true of most things she tried to convey to the people here. It was just so imprecise, communicating solely through the song.

She wondered if she'd ever reach a point where she could call herself fluent in the song, or if she'd missed her chance growing up under Imperial rule. Perhaps, at least, it was not too late for the next generation.

They returned to the same building where they'd met with the Elders before. Shay wasn't certain if it was a government building, a home, or something else entirely. It was so foreign to everything she was used too--large and grand and luxuriously furnished, full of staff whose function Shay couldn't begin to guess. They were shown to the rooftop terrace where the Elders had already gathered, the scribe from before smiling sheepishly as he greeted Shay and Hunk in the song.

The Elders sang, and the scribe sobered at once. Shay did not think there had been a reprimand in the melodies she could only just hear, but it was clear this was not a social call. He pulled out his stylus and the strange paper that glowed where he wrote.

_Greetings, Lion-Singers. I hope all is well with your kin._

Meri translated, a note of curiosity in her voice. She knew that Shay, Hunk, and Yellow had had to converse with these Balmerans via Ancient Altean--that was why she had come, to help with the translation process--but Shay supposed knowing it was not the same as seeing it for herself. She wondered whether this was the same language Meri had grown up with, or if it was older. Perhaps it had drifted from true Altean over the years.

Whatever the case, Meri didn't comment on it as she translated, nor as she wrote out Hunk's response for the scribe. "It wasn't easy, but we pulled through. Thank you for seeing us again."

The pleasantries continued for a time. Hunk seemed more comfortable with how long it dragged on than either Shay or Meri, though he _had_ been helping Shiro more and more with diplomacy. She supposed he was probably used to this by now.

Shay wasn't certain that using Meri as a translator made things quicker--it took time for her to write out whatever Shay or Hunk said, where Yellow had simply projected the text as soon as they spoke--but it certainly was less strain on the eye. Pidge's visual translator was a wonderful thing, but it didn't take long to give Shay a headache when she had to continually focus on the written word in order to make the program kick in.

Shay tried to remain polite, and to let the Elders steer the conversation, but she could not hold out forever. "Forgiveness," she said, cutting into a lull in the conversation. "I do not wish to seem rude, but perhaps we ought to speak of the real subject of our visit."

"Aid," Meri said, cocking her head to the side as she watched the scribe write in his painstakingly precise penmanship. Meri's was no less neat to Shay's eye, but it was considerably quicker, which told her that the scribe was not practiced in this form of writing. She supposed she should not be surprised; however much there was to learn from the ancient texts, she did not see anything that would suggest it was of much practical use in the day-to-day. "You wish for us to forge an alliance with your Migration, to unite our two peoples."

"I would not presume to ask so much of you," Shay said, shaking her head. "Especially not so soon. We spoke last time of the ailment that afflicts our sister Balmera, Atsiphos. You called it Niskaia."

Meri paused in her writing to give Shay a look, her brow puckered in thought. She went on writing a moment later, and the scribe translated for the Elders.

"That much is already settled. It is a simple thing to treat the infection. We have already selected healers who will accompany you when you leave. They will teach you what they can so you may care for your Balmera even after they have left."

"Really?" Hunk asked, leaning forward. "That's amazing! Thank you." He paused, his smile slipping. "But, uh... How are they gonna communicate? I doubt any of them speak--or, well, _write_ \--Ancient Altean."

The scribe hesitated this time before his voice returned to the song, and Shay studied him, some of her own curiosity slipping into her song despite her best efforts to suppress it. He sang, simple and straightforward, and the Elders only returned acknowledgment before he began to write.

"I will accompany them. You are correct; they will need an interpreter, and we are few." Meri paused, nodding to the page. "He crossed that part out and rewrote it: We do not have true interpreters, but those of us who will suffice are few. Besides. There are so many things the ancient texts speak of that none here have ever seen. I would like the chance to see the world beyond our skies, at least once."

Shay smiled at him. "Then you are more than welcome. Though to my eyes, the universe has few wonders as great as what I have seen here."

The scribe’s song was warm as he relayed this to the Elders, who smiled and nodded to Shay in turn. She suspected they thought her words empty flattery. Truth be told, they may well be awed by the sights they would see that seemed mundane to Shay. It was only the rarity of a Balmera left to prosper and the personal connection that made her so partial to these sights.

The scribe squirmed under the combined attention of all in attendance, and hastily began to transcribe the next stirring in the song. "We have also been thinking," Meri read when he'd finished, "that perhaps we ought to apprise ourselves of the situation beyond our Migration, since it seems the universe is disinclined to leave us be."

"You wish to come as well?" Shay asked, hoping Meri could smooth some of the shock from her words.

"Not all of us, but a delegation, yes. You are our kin, after all. Even if only distantly."

"Well, all right, then," Hunk said. The look he gave Shay said he shared her surprise. "When do you want to head out?"

* * *

Flying Green was easy, as Val had figured it would be. She'd flown Green back to the castle without ever having done it before, and that was when Green was even more distraught than she was now. Things were awkward, and Val kept having to stop and think about how she would do something, had she been in Blue, but they hardly needed to train to be able to loop around the castle a few times.

"You're _sure_ you're up for this," Lance said. Val suspected he was trying not to sound worried… but he sounded worried.

With a sigh, Val pulled Green up beside Blue. There was an echo of another voice in the corner of her mind, as though Val had stepped partway into Blue's cockpit for a moment. If she focused, she could almost sense Lance and Nyma's thoughts, too. "I'll be fine, Lance. You heard Coran; as occupying forces go, this one is shrimpy."

Lance bit down hard on another question, which may have been because Nyma was glaring a hole in the back of his head. He did a good job of pretending to ignore her, but her attention itched beneath his skin, momentarily pulling his thoughts away from all the different ways this might go wrong.

"Give us a shout if you need us," Nyma said, already over the entire ordeal.

Val lifted a hand in acknowledgment, then turned her attention to the planet below. The castle had received a barrage of distress calls during the battle for New Altea and in the immediate aftermath. Akira and Layeni had been working overtime since reaching the edge of the exclusionary zone to try to address them all. Shiro, Allura, Matt, and Keith were out dealing with a string of them now, too, and Val couldn't shake the feeling that she was hurting the war effort by pulling Lance and Nyma away from the other planets that were still waiting for a response.

Maybe that was why she'd pushed for this. Maybe she was just itching for something a little more demanding than puttering around open space. Val wasn't a fighter pilot like Lance or a renegade smuggler-slash-bounty-hunter like Nyma. There were better people to send into battle without a co-pilot.

But _she_ was the one Green had chosen, and that meant that, unless and until Pidge was back in the action, Val was going to have to work overtime--even at things she would much rather have left to the other paladins.

There was a single Imperial ship in the air over the largest city, a small fleet of fighters grounded in the plains outside city limits. Val angled toward the larger ship, her spine tingling as Green stretched into the dive, her mind coming alive in a way that wasn't enough like Blue to be familiar. It was too prickly, too oppressive. It didn't mold itself to Val's mind the way Blue's consciousness did. Instead, it hovered just over her shoulder like an unseen watcher, making her second guess her every move.

"Hey," she said as the ship loomed large in her viewscreen. "Do you suppose I could bilocate during battle? Once I'm better at this, I mean," she added, as her first shot hit a fraction off-target. She'd been hoping to disable the shields in one go, but instead she only left a gouge in the hull and drew the attention of every Imperial in the area. "Have one of me fly Green and the other hang with you guys in Blue?"

Lance made a curious noise, seeming to consider that, but Nyma just scoffed and opened fire on the first fighters to join the fray. "Can we deal with these guys first? Or are you going to try this right now and probably get both our lions shot down?"

There was no more bite than usual to Nyma's words, and Val grinned, twirling between two squads of fighters coming at her from either side. Green might actually have been a little more nimble than Blue, for all Val felt clumsy in her cockpit. She twirled at the lightest touch, moving almost too quickly for Val to stay in control as they danced between enemies, taking shots where they could and slowly thinning the herd.

It was, as Coran had promised, an easy battle. Lance and Nyma were visibly holding back from decimating the fighters before Val had a chance to get used to her new lion, which was appreciated, even if it was just the slightest bit irritating. Val was well aware of how far she had to go, thanks. Maybe she should have come alone.

She got her practice in, though. That was the important part. Incidentally, she'd been right: giving her and Green something to focus on besides the newness of their bond and the fact that neither of them were who the other really wanted to be flying with--putting an enemy in front of them and turning them loose made it all a little bit less awkward. They actually worked together pretty well, when they weren't overthinking it.

A few more battles, and they might even be able to get through without embarrassing themselves.

The awkwardness crept back in as the skies cleared and Val followed Blue down to the city. Val kept catching whiffs of strange odors--pine trees and warm soil and something sweet that could have been any number of flowers Val wasn't familiar with. It took her several seconds too long to realize that it was Green, trying to communicate.

The scents faded at once, and Green extended an apology, simple and straightforward, as close to words as the Lions ever came. Well, no. Blue had used actual words once, when she officially took Coran as her adjunct. And they'd all used words in the Heart. Those were exceptions, though (and truth be told, Val wasn't sure if there _had_ been words to the conversation in the Heart, or if they'd all been so deep in the paladin bond that they didn't _need_ words to understand with perfect clarity what was being said.)

 _It's fine, Green,_ Val thought, focusing with all her mind on the new connection between them. Green rumbled, and Val had a feeling the effect was something like shouting in her ear. She winced, letting up a little when she continued. _We'll get there. It'll just take a little time, no big deal._

It _was_ a big deal, and neither Val nor Green were convinced otherwise by Val's optimism, but Val, at least, was certain that things were going to get better. They just needed to get to know each other a little more first.

A sudden broadcast broke across the viewscreen, pulling Val out of her thoughts. "Why have you returned?"

It was the fear in the voice that drew her up short, even before the video feed cleared, showing her a willowy alien that appeared to be trying to compact themself into as small a space as possible. Four eyes stared out at her, wide and unblinking, and three-fingered hands clawed at the collar of their long, loose jacket.

"Returned?" Lance asked. "What...?"

"We have done everything you asked of us," the alien said, their voice trembling. "We allowed the Galra delegation to enter our capital. We signed the peace treaty with the representative of Lord Zarkon. We have made no move to fight your troops or to undermine your governor's authority. So _why have you returned?_ "

"Hold up just a second." Lance held up a hand, shaking his head like he was trying to clear his ears. "You think we're with the _Empire?_ "

The alien hesitated, all four of their eyes searching the screen as though they expected a trick of some sort. "You _are._ I know you are. I have seen it with my own eyes."

Something cold condensed inside Val's chest, and she glanced to the screen that showed Nyma, her face drawn with the same chilling realization. "What do you mean you saw it?" Nyma demanded. "What did you see? _Us?_ We've never been to this planet."

"I... We saw the Lions. The Blue and the Yellow. They attacked our cities, slaughtered our elders and children. Governor Nelvek promised us the slaughter would end if we signed a treaty with the Empire. So we did. And you left."

Lance had already realized what Nyma was getting at with her questions, and his face was stricken as he searched for a response. "That... That wasn't us. I swear to you, we would never-- _Voltron_ would _never._ We protect people; we don't hurt them. We don't--"

"Zarkon has built counterfeit Lions," Nyma said, her voice unwavering. The alien straightened at once, maybe hearing the conviction in her voice, maybe just scared to get on her bad side. "We're looking for those Lions, actually. Any information you can give us would be a tremendous help."

"In the mean time," Lance said, his own tone evening out as he gathered his wits, "we're not here to hurt you. I promise you that. We came to drive the Empire out, and to help make sure they never come back."

The alien, though, only shook their head. "We don't want your help," they said, the words scarcely more than a whisper. "Please. All we want is to be left alone."

"But--"

" _Please._ If you truly mean us no harm, just... go."

They ended the call, leaving the three paladins in stunned silence. Val stared at the city below, her heart in her throat. "What do we do?"

"Exactly what they asked us to do," Nyma said. "We go."

Lance rounded on her. " _Go?_ These people were attacked by the Empire! If we abandon them, they'll only be attacked again!"

"And _if_ they are, we'll step in. Until then, us staying here can only make things worse. They don't know us. They don't _trust_ us. And _we_ have a bigger issue right now."

"Dark Voltron," Val whispered.

Nyma nodded. "I was right. Rolo and Rax... Haggar did the same thing to them that she did to Commander Holt, and she sent them here. We have to stop her."

"We will," Lance promised. He stared for a long moment at the city, then turned Blue around. "Let's go. The others need to know about this."

* * *

The free Balmerans' arrival on Atsiphos sent ripples through the Balmera. Even without being privy to the currents of song that ran beneath the surface, Meri could see it. It brightened Hunk's smile and lent a spring to Shay's step. Heads poked out of side tunnels, and whispers chased the small delegation as they headed for the deepest chambers.

The scribe kept pace beside Meri, openly gawking at the tunnels around them. They'd decided to call him Bek, from _bekalvia_ , the closest they could come to in the Altean language to a description of the complex weaving of memories and emotions and relationships that denoted him apart from anyone else on his home Balmera. He seemed confused by the name, but appreciative. (Meri suspected he read a more personal connection into the name, when the truth was Meri, Hunk, and Shay simply needed something to call him by. Ideally, they would have names for the entire delegation, but Bek was the only one so far who had spoken with the paladins long enough to make the attempt.)

Bek carried the holopad Meri had given him on the journey over--a quicker way for them to communicate, and one that didn't require a flat, stable surface on which to write.

"Is this where these people _live_?" he sent to Meri--no emphasis, but the look on his face made the tone clear. " _Inside_ their Balmera?"

Meri glanced sidelong at Shay, who kept close to the visitors, radiating awkwardness and anxiety. Hunk had been rambling when they first departed the free Balmera--rambling enough that Meri hadn't been able to keep up with her translation--but he'd fallen silent now, smiling at the Balmerans come to see the procession but not offering much in the way of explanation for the strangers who didn't speak.

"Yeah," Meri wrote back to Bek. "Your people all live on the surface, right?"

"Yes. It is a sacred thing, to go inside the Balmera. We must prepare before we venture below the surface, and I have never known anyone to stay longer than a few hours."

Was _that_ why this entire group felt like it was on the verge of snapping? Meri had sensed it, that tension, but she'd assumed they were just nervous about leaving the relative safety of their Migration. "Sorry," she told Bek. "I didn't realize. Should we stop? So you can do whatever you need to to prepare?"

Bek hesitated before responding, but then he shook his head, smiling at Meri. "No. The Balmera does not resent our presence, and the Elder is anxious to meet with your council. There is no need to delay on our account."

That wasn't how hospitality worked, but Meri didn't belabor the point. Stopping now would have been difficult, anyway, if only because Meri had a feeling the Balmerans watching from the shadows would grow impatient and come to find out what was happening. If the delegation was okay pressing on, then Meri wouldn't argue with them.

Still, their discomfort prickled at Meri as they continued deeper. Bek had said Atsiphos didn't resent their presence; did that mean their own Balmera _did_ resent those who set foot in her tunnels, if they did so without the proper preparation? Meri wondered if it had always been like that, before the Empire began to enslave Balmerans and force them to mine their homes. She'd never been lucky enough to visit a Balmera before the war, though Coran had told stories. She was pretty sure _he'd_ been inside a Balmera, so they couldn't be too picky about who they let into their tunnels.

Maybe the free Balmerans were the ones who had changed, rather than the other way around. Meri didn't suppose she'd ever know for sure, not unless somebody had happened to keep detailed records on things like this and was willing to share those records with outsiders.

The Elders were waiting in the heart chamber when the group arrived. The expectation was thick enough to be stifling, and Meri suddenly wished she hadn't volunteered to act as translator. She didn't want to be at the center of that kind of scrutiny; it reminded her too keenly of the other, less friendly, scrutiny she'd faced in recent months, and all she wanted to do was retreat to the edges of the room and stay out of everyone's way.

"It is true, then?" one of the Elders breathed, taking a step forward. She glanced to Shay, and then inclined her head toward the delegation. "We had heard that Elder Shay had found free Balmera, but we hardly dared believe it was true. We are honored to welcome you into our home."

Meri hastened to translate, and as Bek passed the message along, shock passed over the Atsiphos Elders' faces.

"Your pardon, Elders," Shay said. She transformed as she stepped into the spotlight, shedding the uncertainty and self-consciousness that normally made her curl in on herself. She seemed to age a decade in the blink of an eye, shifting into someone whose right to be in this place could not be cast into question. "We were wary of sending too much information ahead. The Empire has ears too many places these days, and we did not want them to learn of this. We found a Migration of six Balmera, unknown to the Empire for generations, although a recent attack makes me worried that they may not be able to continue in secret much longer. One of their Elders agreed to meet with the Elders of our alliance." She gestured to the Elder, who had left his entourage behind, Bek joining him at the center of the room where the other Elders waited. "The free Balmera do not share our spoken language; they communicate solely through the Balmera song, and they have brought a scribe, who together with Paladin Meri will act as interpreters so we may speak freely."

There was a moment of awkward silence as the other Elders absorbed this information, and Meri barely stopped herself from groaning when a message from Bek appeared on her tablet. Of course she was going to have to be the one to break the silence.

She shifted to a pleasantly neutral face, cleared her throat, and spoke. "Thank you for your welcome, Elders. It has been many generations since we have had contact with those outside our Migration. I confess I was among those who thought us the last of the Balmerans."

"There is no shame in that," the Elder who had spoken before said. She covered her surprise well and kept her eyes on the visiting Elder, taking some of the pressure off Meri, who focused on her tablet and on transcribing the Elder's words as quickly as she could. "Elder Shay may have already told you, but many of us thought the Balmera had all been captured by the Empire or hunted to extinction by now. We hardly dared hope her quest might meet with success."

The response was slow in coming, and Meri squirmed in the silent interim. "The Empire has taken much from our people. We are fortunate for the chance to recover a small portion of what was lost."

"Not a small portion for us," another Elder said, his voice soft with emotion, and the entire delegation stilled for a moment when Bek translated.

At length, the visiting Elder bowed his head. "You are right, of course. Forgive me. We have kept to ourselves so long in order to protect our people that I suppose we did not realize how much we have to share."

"Then you wish to forge an alliance?" Shay asked, trying to mask her hope.

"Perhaps. There is much to speak of on that front, and it can wait a short while longer. Our healers can sense the extent of the Niskaia infection, and they are anxious to begin."

These words caused a stir that spread outward from the heart chamber. By the time they left, the entire Balmera was abuzz with anticipation. Atsiphos' healers, and those who had come from Metos and Theros to help, rushed to meet the delegation, many of them on the verge of tears. Meri and Bek, as the only translators, were in high demand, doing what they could to translate complex techniques clearly enough for the local healers to understand what the visitors were doing. Shay assured Meri that, together with what Atsiphos herself communicated and the flows of Quintessence, the lesson was well-learned, but even so Meri kept second-guessing herself.

As long as Atsiphos ended up healthy in the end, she supposed she couldn't be too hard on herself. And the treatment _did_ seem to be helping, even if Meri herself didn't totally understand what they were doing. There was a certain way of directing the Quintessence flows that drew the parasite out, concentrating it so the healers could kill it.

The process would need to be repeated all across the Balmera for several days after symptoms subsided to be sure they'd eradicated every last Niskaia, but once they got started, Meri was finally able to step back and breathe.

And of course it was hardly ten minutes later that Shay came to her with an apologetic smile to say that the Elders were meeting again. Everyone wanted to talk about the possibility of an alliance--of Metos, Theros, and Atsiphos joining the Migration, perhaps. Meri couldn't fault them for their eagerness.

She wouldn't have minded more rest, though.

She dragged herself up anyway, smiled at Bek, and trudged back down to the heart chamber with Shay. They'd hardly even started with the formalities before they were interrupted, a Balmeran bursting through the curtain that separated this chamber from the tunnel outside. She stumbled to a stop, her Quintessence stirring in embarrassment as every eye turned her way, and dropped her chin to her chest.

"Forgiveness, Elders," she muttered. "But there has just been an urgent message from Metos. Please, Elder Shay, Paladin Hunk. They need you. There has been an attack."

* * *

It took too long to get to the surface. Even Yellow was restless by the time the three paladins piled into her cockpit and took off for the skies. Meri had already contacted Coran, filling him in on the sparse details she had gleaned. He, too, had seen the distress call, and the other paladins were finishing with their own missions--just in case Yellow needed backup.

Considering how little they had to go on, Meri was glad for it.

"Coran," she said, breathless, as she steadied herself on the back of Shay's seat. Yellow took off for the skies as quickly as Meri had ever seen her move, opening a wormhole as close to the Balmera as she dared and plunging in. "If anyone is able to get away... Don't wait to hear from us."

"You think it's that bad?"

Meri traded looks with Shay, who looked physically ill. "I hope not, but I'd rather not take the chance. Better to waste five minutes if it turns out to be nothing."

He nodded, ending the call so he could update the other paladins. A moment later, Yellow emerged from the far side of the wormhole. Metos was a small, faintly sparkling shape in the distance, a nearby star lighting her in warm hues. From here, she couldn't make out many details--but she could see the thing attacking the Balmera.

It wasn't a ship, even a warship; it was far too large, and far too nimble. It snaked around the Balmera, dodging attacks from the Olkari-built defensive system. Yellow sped toward the battle, and Meri's heart sank further. A large crater marred one side of the Balmera, and Meri could guess where it had come from.

The creature was long and serpentine, its body covered in glittering black scales that blended with the backdrop of stars. Emerald green and blood red striped the spines that trailed from the back of its head to the base of its tail, each the size of a mountain. (It was a chilling comparison, but Meri couldn't get it out of her mind. It was as though the mountain range on Olkarion that separated Vivasi from Inanimasi had lifted from the planet's surface, come to life, and begun attacking defenseless Balmera.)

"Holy shit," Hunk muttered. "That's the biggest robeast I've ever seen."

Shay opened fire, and the creature turned, electric green eyes fixing on the Yellow Lion. Its spines shivered, the reds and greens glowing brighter in what could only be a warning.

"That's not a robeast," Meri whispered, horror stealing the breath from her lungs. She'd seen this creature before, but only ever on holos and in still images in the archives. It had gone extinct millennia ago, the last one killed years before Meri first set foot on the Castle of Lions.

Shay turned, her eyes wide. "What do you mean? What is it?"

"Look out!" Hunk cried, and Shay moved on instinct, throwing the Yellow Lion to the side as the creature charged. Its presence hung in the air, filling the cockpit with an electric pressure, and for a long moment, Meri was frozen with a cold, primal terror. Yellow twisted again, and Meri forced herself to stand, to face the thing of nightmares.

"That," she said, "is a Vkullor."


	6. The Vkullor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The Castle of Lions returned to the front lines, and the paladins each went to their own fights. Pidge attempted to make amends with Green, but that didn't go well. They ended up running into Val, who helped them calm down and promised that she could fly Green for as long as Pidge needed to heal. Later, she went out training, Lance and Nyma backing her up in Blue. Hunk, Shay, and Meri revisited the free Balmera, who agreed to send aid to help treat Atsiphos's Niskaia infection. The conference with Atsiphos's Elders was interrupted, however, when Metos sent out a distress call. Hunk, Shay, and Meri were the first to respond, and they found the Balmera under attack by a Vkullor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Slightly more graphic violence than usual, mostly in flashback (the italicized section that begins, "There was no time to clean her up...") Grief related to Ryner's and Lealle's deaths, and a panic attack/anxiety in Pidge's POV section.

"Coran!" Meri screamed, maintaining a death grip on an overhead handle as Shay swerved aside, narrowly avoiding the Vkullor's charge. "Coran, _answer me!_ "

"I'm here." Meri cranked up the volume on her comms. It was probably the blood rushing in her ears and maybe the roar of Yellow's engines, but Coran's voice sounded impossibly faint, and it made Meri's stomach flutter. "What's happening?"

For just an instant, she considered breaking the news to him gently, then immediately discarded the idea. You didn't hem and haw where a Vkullor was concerned. If you did, you died, and Meri, Shay, and Hunk were _all_ dead if the other paladins didn't make it here soon.

"It's a Vkullor," she said, the word sending a shiver through her chest. "I don't know where the others are, but we need them here. _Now._ "

Coran let out a soft, wheezing breath, like he'd just been punched in the gut. "Quiznak. All right. Hold on. I'll get them there as soon as possible."

"Sooner," Meri said, and muted her mic with a thought as she grabbed onto Hunk and Shay's chairs and steadied herself between them. "You heard that? The others are coming. We need to hold out for a few minutes. Don't fight that thing, and _don't_ let it get close enough to hit you."

"What do you mean, don't fight it?" Hunk asked, voice rising in pitch. "Meri, that thing was attacking the Balmera! If we don't do something, people are going to die!"

"And if we try to face it on our own, _we're_ going to die, and the Yellow Lion with us. I know--Look out!"

Shay yelped as the Vkullor suddenly reversed, twisting back on itself like a coiling snake. The tip of its tail lashed out as it finished its turn, and Shay barely turned them aside in time to avoid getting bludgeoned by the beast's barbed tail. Meri's breath caught in her throat, and she was hit again by the sheer scale of this thing. Yellow was barely more than a flea next to it, so small that the very tip of its tail was still several times taller than Yellow.

"The last time paladins faced one of these, it took Voltron _and_ the entire Voltron Guard, and they still almost lost. Thousands of Guard pilots died--more than half the fleet--and all of the paladins wound up in cryopods. Lealle--" Meri's breath hitched, a dull ache shooting through her chest. "Lealle almost _died_. One lion doesn't stand a chance."

The Vkullor was closing in on Metos again, that bioluminescent glow rippling down the length of its body. Shay breathed in, glanced at Hunk, and Meri opened her mouth to step in, but they were already moving.

"I'll go below," Hunk said, releasing the catch on his harness and sliding out of his chair. "See if I can get us any more speed."

Shay nodded. "Do not worry," she said to Meri. "I will try not to get us killed. But I would rather its attention be on us. We, at least, stand a chance of evading its attacks." She hesitated, shooting a wry smile over her shoulder. "You may wish to sit down."

"Fuck." Meri slid into Hunk's seat, her heart fluttering in her chest, and strapped herself in as Shay urged Yellow forward. "The tail is the most dangerous, from what I've heard," she said. If she wasn't going to talk Shay out of this, she figured, the least the could do was arm her with as much information as possible. "Don't lose sight of it, and if that thing starts to turn around, clear out." She braced herself on the console as Shay closed the distance, Yellow's lasers whining as they charged up. "Claws and mouth are the other big ones, and normally I'd tell you to stay away from its head, but that's kind of hard to do when you're goading it into chasing you."

Shay laughed, the sound slightly hysterical. "Anything else I should know?"

"I'm not kidding about the mouth," Meri said. "This thing isn't a robeast; there aren't lasers or cannons or anything like that built in. It doesn't have any long-range attacks. But I've seen footage of it attacking a planet. I don't know if it uses gravity or Quintessence or something else to do it, but it can shatter a planet right down to its core to get at the crystal."

Shay shot her a wild look, and Meri shrugged helplessly.

"I'll make it easy on you--if it opens its mouth, _get away._ "

Shay looked far less certain about this plan now, which was how Meri knew she'd succeeded in getting her point across, but by now they were virtually on top of the beast, which was, in turn, rapidly closing on the Balmera. It was a miracle the Vkullor hadn't already shattered Metos, and Meri clung to that fact as evidence that maybe somehow this particular Vkullor didn't have that ability.

She didn't mention the possibility to Shay; better to treat it as more dangerous than it was, rather than the other way around.

They skimmed up along the creature's side, beside the towering spines, toward the back of its head. There, Shay took a deep breath and fired the shot Yellow had been charging all this time. The beam was thicker than Meri was used to, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes as the shot hit the Vkullor just below the ridge that marked the base of its skull.

The light rippling along its spines dimmed, a wave of darkness that spread outward from the point of impact, and when it returned, it was brighter, and tinged more red than green.

"Move!" Meri roared, her feet trying to propel her backwards even though she had nowhere to go. The Vkullor's massive head swung around, the sheer scale of it making the motion sluggish, but Meri caught a flash of electric green eye, and she felt as though the creature were looking straight into her soul.

Then Yellow turned and took off, and all Meri could do was hold on and pray the others made it in time.

* * *

Val had been dreading this moment for months. Ever since Coran had told them about the egg, she'd been waiting. She'd told herself it was impossible, it would never happen, but somewhere deep down, she'd always known.

_Vkullor._

She'd only just returned to the castle with Lance and Nyma. They'd headed to the bridge to fill Coran in on the situation they'd encountered--attacks by Haggar's Blue and Yellow Lions, proof that Nyma had been right all along. They hadn't even had time to start talking when Meri's frantic call had come through.

There was a Vkullor attacking Metos, and Yellow needed backup.

"I'll get in touch with the others," Coran said. "They'll be there. Don't try anything until they arrive; you're going to need Voltron if you're to stand any chance against something like that."

The word Voltron brought Val up short. She'd been headed for the elevator to Green's hangar, only a few seconds behind Lance and Nyma on their way to Blue, but she stopped as their elevator hissed shut and whisked them away. _Voltron._

She was going to have to form Voltron. She'd done it before--in training a few times, and once in battle--but always from inside the Blue Lion, and always with at least one other blue paladin there with her. This time she would be alone in Green.

She told herself it wouldn't be any different. Voltron was Voltron, and Green hadn't mentioned any caveats to this bond of theirs.

"Val?"

Val jumped as Karen placed a hand on her shoulder. "Mrs. H," she said, a little breathless. "Forgot you were here."

Karen frowned, though she didn't comment. She'd already been working closely with Coran, but ever since Keturah's hijacking of the castle had left half Coran's crew injured--had left several of them dead--Karen had been taking a more active role on the bridge. Of course she was here now.

"It's going to be all right, Val," Karen said, her voice dropping low so only Val could hear. "The Green Lion chose you. That bond is real. There's nothing to worry about. You can form Voltron with her just as well as Pidge could."

Val looked up at her, momentarily stunned at how easily Karen got to the heart of her worries, almost like she could read Val's mind.

There was a furrow in her brow, just a glimmer of uncertainty--but not about Val's ability to form Voltron.

"So, does your adjunct bond apply to me now, too?" Val asked, offering her half a smile.

Karen let out a breathless laugh and tucked Val’s hair behind her ear. "I think it does, actually."

And that... Well, that was comforting in itself. If the adjunct bond was treating Val like a green paladin, then there was no reason the Voltron bond couldn't do the same.

 _Do or die time,_ Val told herself, flashing Karen one last smile as she shoved her helmet on and sprinted into the elevator.

_I did say I wanted some real hands-on training._

* * *

Matt's hands shook as he carried them away from the planet Calvialden. There was still work to be done here, still lingering traces of Imperial influence, but that would have to wait. If Coran's face when he told them about the Vkullor wasn’t enough to light a fire under Matt, then the terror that raced through Keith like a bolt of lightning certainly would have done the trick.

They'd pulled out at once, Matt barely coherent enough to contact the local leaders and tell them there had been an emergency, but that they'd return soon. Keith opened the wormhole as soon as they cleared the atmosphere, and they hit it at top speed, bursting out the other side to the sight of a monster that was incomprehensibly vast.

Most of the other Lions were already there, but there was no sign of Shiro and Allura. Yellow looked like she'd taken a bad hit, and Green and Blue swarmed the Vkullor, trying to lure it away.

For a moment, Keith hesitated, something deeper and colder and darker than any brand of terror Matt had ever sensed from him before creeping into the bond. Matt forgot how to breathe, and Red rumbled, giving the impression of a cat hissing and puffing up when presented with a threat.

Then the comms crackled, Lance calling out to Hunk with a similar terror in his voice.

"We're fine," Hunk said, though he, too sounded rattled. "Banged up, but not down for the count yet. Can you buy me a little bit of time? I need to give Yellow's shields some extra _oomph_ if we're gonna take another hit like that."

"You'd better hope you _don't_ ," Meri said. "Lance, I know you're thinking about getting in its face. Don't you _dare._ "

Keith recovered, snarling as he forced the fear away and pushed Red's engines to their maximum.

"She's right," Matt said, as cocky as he could manage, as he caught onto Keith's intent. "You guys watch our backs. We'll lead this thing on a chase."

Lance spluttered, Meri cursed, and Shay got two syllables into a protest before Red was on the Vkullor, twisting to hit feet-first. They hovered there for a moment, crouched against the creature's cheek beside an eye the size of a lake. Matt had never felt so small as he did now, looking out over what seemed to be perfectly still, perfectly clear water, with the textured lake bed plainly visible in the depths--and a chasm incomprehensibly deep cut through the center of it, slitted at first and then flaring wide as the eye rolled toward the Red Lion. It made Matt queasy, that motion, like the ground beneath them had tipped off its axis.

Red opened her mouth and breathed fire into the Vkullor's eye.

The pupil contracted, now a line cutting straight across the lake, but still wide enough to swallow a lion whole.

Matt’s blood turned to ice.

All three of them moved as one, kicking off the Vkullor's face and flying as fast as Red's engines would let them. They left the Balmera behind, left the other lions, flashed passed asteroids and planets and a star in rapid succession.

And the Vkullor kept pace.

It didn't react as quickly as Red; for the first second or two it only thrashed, its spines rippling with an eerie light, and Matt thought it may not have even noticed their departure. They were so far gone, and the Vkullor so distant that it could have passed for an ordinary robeast before it started to chase them. Once it did, though, it gained speed, and gained speed, and its bulk slowly expanded until it filled Matt's vision.

They turned, and the Vkullor swung wide behind them.

It was back on their tail too quickly, and Matt's dread swelled, closing in around his throat. Red echoed it, and Matt realized distantly that he'd never felt her truly afraid.

She was afraid now. He didn't think she'd ever encountered something as fast as she was, not when she was at her full potential. She remembered the last Vkullor being fast, but she'd had only one paladin then; she'd had to hold back. She'd been sure, this time, that she would be faster.

She was faster to turn than it was; she could outmaneuver it. But if she stayed too close, she risked it blindsiding her with a tail so big even Red wasn't fast enough to dodge it.

"Keith. Matt. Where are you?"

Red's relief was so potent it left Matt momentarily speechless, and it took him a moment to piece together what it was she was relived _by._ Not Shiro's voice in and of itself, though _Matt_ certainly found it comforting.

No, Shiro meant Black, and Black meant Voltron.

"Not exactly sure," Keith said. "We kinda took off running. I can just see you at the edge of our scanners."

"Head back this way," Allura said. "We need to form Voltron."

Matt stared at the Vkullor, which was still dogging their every move. Everyone kept saying that they needed Voltron to fight this thing, but Matt wasn't entirely convinced on that point. Oh, he could _easily_ believe that anything less than Voltron was as much fodder to a Vkullor.

He just wasn't sure that Voltron would fare any better.

They headed back anyway, because Red couldn't keep this up forever, and all it would take was one mistake and they'd end up splattered across the Vkullor's hide.

Keith's distant memories supplied Matt with a dozen other gruesome ways to go. It seemed Galra horror stories were full of Vkullors crushing, burning, blasting, eating, and otherwise killing hapless bystanders.

Somehow, the reality than worse than all of the stories combined.

The other lions appeared as specks in the distance, racing towards him. Matt felt the tug of Voltron when they were still much too far apart to merge. How long had it been since they'd all been together? Red had been on the homeworld for most of the last year--all except a few short days for Hunk and Shay's Unity, and Matt had been on Oriande until the end of that.

"Makes you wish we could do this when things were a little less dire, doesn't it?" Keith asked, a faint laugh in his voice.

Matt snorted. "Yeah. You know, I could really go for some good old-fashioned robeast smashing right about now."

"Maybe after we're done here," Shiro said dryly. "For now, we need to focus. Everyone together, now. Form Voltron!"

* * *

The Voltron bond was... off.

They couldn't pinpoint a single cause. It was just... a lot.

It was that they were all a little rusty at this, more used to fighting alone and in pairs than as a single unit.

It was that too many minds were too shaken by the appearance of the Vkullor, and that fear had a way of slithering into the bond, strangling it, paralyzing it. The last connection clicked into place, but for long seconds, they couldn't move.

There was a hole.

A hole in their team.

An unbalance in the bond.

Val filled the hole as best she could, patched it over, like a binding covering a wound--but there was no ignoring Pidge's absence or the grief that thundered through them all, rooted in Green but echoed in every heart.

Ryner was gone, and Pidge wasn't here, and Voltron was blind without their connection to deepen their perception of the universe around them.

Alone in Green's cockpit, Val began to hyperventilate.

It wasn't a failure on her part. Everyone reassured her of that, but it wasn't enough. Because Val had never been the one who could face the horrors of the universe alone. She'd never been the lone paladin in her lion, she'd never had to carry the weight of Voltron on her own, maintaining one fifth of the bond with only her sureness to steady it.

If someone had to bridge the gap, it shouldn't have been her.

Meri placed a hand on Val's shoulder, the touch warm and grounding. If Val didn't turn her head, she could almost believe Meri was there beside her, in the flesh. It wasn't the almost-there presence of Shiro and Allura that stood at every paladins' shoulder. This was something simpler than that, and something more real.

"You're not alone, Val," Meri said.

She didn't have the words to explain what she meant, but Val felt it just the same. They were of one mind in the Voltron bond, just as they were inside Blue's cockpit. Val steeled herself, straightened, and took up Green's controls.

And the Vkullor barreled into them, driving the breath from every lung as it slapped them with the side of its tail, sending them tumbling through open space. They caught sight of Metos, still limping along, the horrific wound in her surface sending a chill down every spine. Yellow and Blue flared their boosters, steadying Voltron, and Red extended her sword.

"Careful," Allura said, her heart in her throat. Flickers of memories, of Coran cradling a much younger Allura as another Vkullor wreaked havoc on Voltron and her support ships, danced at the edge of the bond, lending weight to her warning. "This is not a fight we can win. Not alone and unprepared as we are."

"We have to do _something,_ " Keith said, and it was Shay's heartache leaking into his voice, dragging him bodily toward the hurting Balmera and the dead and dying beneath her skin.

"We will," Lance said. "Allura just means we shouldn't push too hard."

Shiro nodded, taking a breath that steadied them all. "Our goal here isn't to kill the Vkullor; that will come later, when we've had time to plan and prepare."

Allura flicked a switch, opening a line to the castle. "Coran, prepare a wormhole for the Balmera. Take her somewhere safe. Somewhere far from here. We'll keep this thing busy until you're clear."

"I'm on it," he said, already shouting orders to his crew as he cut the connection.

The paladins turned their attention back to the Vkullor, which circled them. Between the sharp green eyes and the subtly shifting hues of its spines, it gave off the impression of being far older and far more intelligent than Vkullor were known to be.

The thought that Haggar may have found a way to make this Vkullor more cunning than its ancestors took root in the bond and spread quickly, frosting over the top of the paladins' thoughts.

"It's just another robeast," Keith said, well aware that his statement rang hollow. "Let's see what it can do."

They charged, some more reluctant than others. Shiro and Allura danced around them all, keeping them focused, keeping them hopeful. They charged, and Red hefted her sword, leveling it at the Vkullor's eye--the same eye she'd burned, though there wasn't so much as a mark there now to say they'd done any lasting damage.

The Vkullor twisted. The sword glanced off its hide, leaving a scratch that vanished into the texture of the scales as the creature continued to roll, mesmerizing patterns rippling across its skin.

This time they saw the tail approaching, and the impulse to raise their shield came from every mind at once--even Val's, and for an instant too long she waited for someone else to respond.

The awareness that _she_ was the one in Green now, that _she_ was the one with the shield, rattled her, shivering outward through the bond and shaking them all. This wasn't right. This wasn't how it was meant to be.

Val fumbled with her controls, her mind flickering between Blue's cockpit and Green's, darting over to Yellow, where Meri still sat. The two halves of the shield stirred, and Green lifted her head to catch them--but the Vkullor was faster, its tail snapping into the hole in their guard.

They tumbled, the bond straining, the blow ringing through every inch of their bodies, both flesh and metal. It was staggering, the power behind the blow. All the more so because the Vkullor hardly looked like it was trying. A lazy, almost lethargic flick of the tail, and they were all but down for the count.

It was toying with them.

The realization spread from Hunk to Shay, from Meri to Val, from Allura to Shiro to Matt. It was paranoia, and it was the Vkullor's reputation, and it was the memories of a terrified child watching the most powerful force in the universe get tossed around like a yupper's plaything.

It was the chilling and humbling realization that if this thing wanted them dead, there was very little they could do to stop it.

A wormhole blossomed in the distance, its light catching every eye-- _every_ eye. The Vkullor's head whipped around, pupils constricting to slits as it stared at the new light. It couldn't have understood what that light meant, or that it had anything to do with the wounded Balmera, but its bioluminescence flared, its lip pulled back in a snarl, and it flared its spines as it took off toward the wormhole.

All thoughts of the helplessness of this fight were forgotten. Plans, tactics, desperate ploys flickered through the paladins' minds. It might be easier to lure the Vkullor through a wormhole than to distract it long enough for Metos to limp through... But Coran was already struggling to hold a wormhole large enough to fit a Balmera; the Vkullor would have to hit it perfectly to go through and not tear through the side of the gate.

 _...That's one way to skin a Vkullor,_ Lance thought.

Allura rejected the idea at once, though Meri and Hunk weren't far behind. They couldn't be sure a compromised wormhole would kill a Vkullor, and the consequences of such a thing could be as devastating as they were far-reaching.

Keith and Matt didn't _think_ about what might work and what might not, about the best way to come at the beast or the things they had to look out for. They simply _moved_ , and they moved with such conviction that all of Voltron moved with them.

Their sword glanced off the Vkullor's back again, just about as effective as taking on a soldier with a sewing needle. Less, maybe, because at least a sewing needle might find flesh and draw blood once in a while. The Vkullor didn't even seem to notice their attacks.

They traded the sword for the shoulder mounted cannon and unleashed a barrage that left tiny pockmarks in the Vkullor's hide, but did nothing more to distract it from the wormhole in the distance.

They'd done a better job distracting it when it was just Red.

The thought had time to crystallize, front and center in the paladins’ collective mind, before Keith and Matt slammed a door on the bond. The connection shattered, the other four lions thrown outward as Red broke away. For a moment, the remnants of the bond hung suspended in the empty air between them, an echo of a connection remaining, and Keith and Matt's resolution resounded in eight other minds. That awareness, the _oneness_ , stretched as Red took off toward the Vkullor's head, but it weakened rapidly as the distance between them grew.

Another instant, and the bond shattered completely.

* * *

"Get the Balmera to safety," Keith said, an unnatural calm settling over him as the Vkullor's spines raced by beside him. "And get yourselves out of here, too."

"And leave you two behind?" Lance demanded. There was a tremor in his voice, and a wild note of fear Keith had heard too often in the last few months. "Not a chance."

"Once you're clear, we'll open our own wormhole," Matt said. "We're small and fast, and we won't need to leave the wormhole open for long."

"We'll be fine," Keith added. The bond may have closed, but he still felt as though he could sense the other paladins' minds out there, reaching out for his own, thick with worry. "This is the only chance we've got."

They didn't argue. Whether they could see the sense behind this plan, or whether they only knew that arguing would ruin whatever chance they had, they didn't try it. They were already specks in the distance, but Keith watched through Matt's eyes as they turned and took off for the Balmera, which was still some way off from the wormhole--and too close to the charging Vkullor for comfort.

A coldness that wasn't quite fear stole over their minds as they cleared the head, skimming out into open space as a flame built inside Red's maw. They unleashed it on the Vkullor--not trying to hurt it, since they already knew they didn't stand a chance of that.

But the light was blinding, brighter than anything the Vkullor probably saw out there in deep space. Its glow wavered as it had before--first dark, then a flood of red. It turned to snap at them, but they were already gone, firing another burst of flame at nothing just to catch the Vkullor's attention and hold it.

Then they took off, flying out at an angle from the wormhole until the Vkullor was nipping at their heels. They turned sharply and took off again, then again, and spotted the Balmera almost on top of the distant wormhole.

They shut off their minds and _flew._ No thought now, no worries. Just Keith and Matt and the Red Lion and open space.

Space that seemed to warp around them, dragging them back like the pull of a black hole, rippling, turning space on its head, twisting until they didn't know which way was forward. It had to be the Vkullor, and it chilled Keith to the bone. A destroyer of planets was bad enough, but to affect spacetime itself?

They had to move faster.

Keith didn't know how much time it took for the others to get the Balmera to safety. It couldn't have been more than a minute or two, but it felt like an hour.

"We're clear," Shiro said, his mind slamming down an urgent command through their connection at the same moment. "Get out of there. _Now._ "

Keith didn't need to be told twice. They wheeled around, opening a wormhole directly in their path to a random set of coordinates--uninhabited space, hopefully, just in case the worst happened.

The milky blue swirl filled Keith's side of the viewscreen, yawning wide open just before him and waiting for Red to plunge in, when something changed. A sudden lightheadedness that drew Keith up short. A pressure in the air, like the sensation of being watched by a thousand unseen eyes, an approaching thunderstorm dampening sound and light and leaving the world surreal.

He didn't see anything hit them. Didn't feel it. Even watching through Matt's eyes out the rear of Red's cockpit, there was no sign that they'd taken a hit. The Vkullor was close, but not within striking distance, and it was still tangled up in itself trying to turn around and follow them.

The image of its mouth, wide open, and a flickering green light pulsing somewhere deep in its throat burned itself into Keith's eyes. It was the last thing he saw before Red gave a lurch, her pain bursting white-hot into his spine. They tumbled into the wormhole, Keith no longer aware enough of his own body to know if he was still holding onto the controls or not.

Another moment, and everything went dark.

* * *

"Vich's team is still having some trouble with the Imperials in the outskirts," Akira said. "Have the other Faus Generation squads finished up with their sectors?"

Layeni hummed, flipping through the most recent reports. "Two and Five were pulled to help Terra and Tea Generations in the foothills outside the city. They're making headway, but we won't be able to call them back quickly enough for it to make a difference." She dismissed the message, and pursed her lips. "We might be able to pull Squad Seven. They haven't finished, but the shipyards have already been evacuated. Post some scouts around the perimeter, send in some drones to watch for movement, and it should hold for a few hours."

Akira nodded sharply, already sending out the orders. He and Layeni had claimed a tower in the heart of the downtown Xelcicora as their base, partly for its central location, partially because it rose high above the city skyline and afforded them an excellent view of the battlefield. With the Imperial fleet in shambles, they didn't have to worry too much about defensibility, which was good, because the structure--a broad, glass-walled observation deck perched high atop a spire barely wide enough for the elevators it housed--would have been a prime target for the bombers that had ravaged the city before the Guard moved in.

They'd been here just two days, but already the worst of the fighting was over. It was a miracle, frankly, but Layeni wasn't going to question it. The occupying forces here on Exadrie weren't used to opposition. They'd grown lax, and the Guard had come in force, taking them by surprise to curtail collateral damage.

It was a sign of how well the operation so far had gone that Akira was here, in command central, running the show like he was meant to, and not out in the thick of it with the men on the ground.

Small blessings.

"Done," Akira said. "Next issue's the highlands."

Layeni frowned, backing out to her inbox. "The highlands? I thought things were going smoothly there. Did I miss a report?"

Akira waved a hand. "They're fine. I just thought--"

He cut off abruptly, and Layeni turned to see what had caught his attention this time. Another report from their scouts? Or had something come up on the screens they had up to analyze the view through the three-sixty windows and flag potential enemy activity?

There were no alerts on the screen, but Akira was staring out at the bay like a robeast had just emerged from the water. Layeni shifted closer, trying to follow the angle of his gaze to figure out what he was looking at, but he stiffened, stepping away from her and letting out a sound like an honest-to-god growl.

Layeni turned her gaze to him, frowning. "What--?"

He lunged forward, colliding with her, and growled again as he shoved her aside.

" _Move!_ "

His voice thrummed, ringing oddly in her ears, and for a moment she couldn’t tell whether there were any words at all to the sound--but it was the sheen in his eyes, like someone had lit a fight in the room and its glow was reflected in his pupils, that brought Layeni up short. She stared at him, and it felt more like staring down a wolf than anything.

She fell back with the force of his shove and slammed against the desk behind her, too stunned to stop him as he bolted past her.

"Commander?" She recovered a moment too late, cursing as the door hissed shut behind him, and reached for her comms even as she stormed after him. "Commander! Where are you going?" No response. "Damn it, Shirogane," she muttered, turning and hurrying back into command central. She jabbed her finger at a technician manning one of the stations. "You. Get me a lock on Commander Shirogane's comm. I want to know where he's off to in such a rush."

The woman saluted and quickly brought up a map of the city, a flashing pip marking Akira's position. Layeni's mood, already sour, continued to dip as he headed for the airfield. Moments later, he disappeared.

"What happened?" Layeni demanded, though she had a sinking feeling she already knew.

The tech swiped the screen, bringing up a string of numbers. "Tracking data shows a spike in altitude before loss of contact. Airfield might be able to track his ship, but my equipment doesn’t have that kind of range."

“That bull-headed--” Layeni breathed, resisting the urge to take her frustration out on the tech. “Someone call down to the airfield and tell them to forward any location data they have to my account. The rest of you, back to work. We’ve got a battle to finish here, with or without Commander Shirogane.”

* * *

There was no alarm to indicate that the paladins had been called to battle. No warning broadcast over the castle's PA. (In hindsight, that made sense; the castle itself didn't seem to be in any danger, and everyone here was still jumpy after witnessing the castle’s capture once. After _being_ captured, in many of their cases. Coran was probably trying not to worry them unnecessarily, and rightly so.)

But that meant it was Green who let Pidge know that something had happened. No one called them up, or came to clue them to what the rest of the team was up to. Why should they? They weren't an acting paladin right now, and everyone knew they were as fragile as anyone else on the castle. Maybe more.

The way Green's sudden terror sent them spiraling into a panic attack that left them paralyzed on their bedroom floor was proof enough of that.

They didn't know the details of what had happened; that was their mother's thing, and Pidge hadn't gotten preternatural knowledge even when they'd been fully immersed in the paladin bond. All they knew was that there had been a barrier between them and Green ever since Ryner's death. As long as they didn't get too close, it was like the space between them was filled with gauze, and Green had taken care not to breach that barrier.

Then, out of nowhere, a spike of fear hit them, shredding the barrier around their mind like so much toilet paper. Something had scared Green, scared them worse than the battle with Dark Green, worse than feeling Ryner die.

Pidge didn't know what could possibly scare a Voltron Lion that bad, but the comparison was damning enough. They made it halfway to the door, vague thoughts of sprinting down to Green's hangar to prepare for battle falling away as they began to hyperventilate. It was a shapeless fear, and all the harder to combat because of it. Didn't matter how much they told themself they were being irrational; they couldn't shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, and they all they could do for a long time was struggle to draw breath as darkness closed in around the edges of their vision.

They didn't know how long the panic attack lasted, but they didn't wait for the last traces of weakness to leave their muscles before they forced themself to stand, fumbling for the door controls and stumbling out into an empty hallway. It was too bright out here, too open, too quiet. Every doorway hid a threat. Every footfall rang too loud in their ears.

They kept walking anyway. They had too much momentum to stop, and they needed to know what had happened. They needed to know no one else had died.

They should have been out there. They knew fuck all about the situation or whether they could have changed the outcome, but they knew they shouldn't have been sitting here, safe in their room, while it was happening.

Without even realizing quite where they were going, they found themself on the bridge, the door sliding open just as Coran flew them into an open wormhole. (Why a wormhole? Where were they? Where were they going? Had they been in danger?)

"Matt? Keith?"

Shiro's voice, full of fear that closed around Pidge's lungs like a vice. They almost fell back into the pattern of hyperventilation before they clutched at their throat, screwing their eyes shut with a silent command to _breathe._

"Where are they?" Lance demanded. "Does anyone see them?"

"These are the coordinates they input," Allura said. "They should be here."

Hunk's face swam into view, one of several displayed on the array of comms feeds pulled up to one side of Coran's station. Hunk looked like he wanted to burst into tears. "What if they didn't make it out? What if the Vkullor got them?"

" _The Vkullor?_ "

Pidge didn't process speaking until their mother spun, her face pinched and her eyes wild. "Pidge."

"We're coming back," Allura said. "Yes, we _are,_ " she added, as though someone had argued, though no one had said a word. "I know you're worried, Shiro, but I can use the castle to track the Red Lion's location. We'll find them faster that way than any other."

"Wait, you can't sense them?" Lance asked. "I thought--your black paladin psychic thingy--" He flailed his hands, full to bursting with the same nervous energy that had the entire team tied up in knots. The same energy trickling into Pidge's veins even now, inching them toward another meltdown.

"We can only sense the rest of you across a relatively short distance," Allura said. She was doing a better job than anyone of maintaining an illusion of calm, but there were fissures in her composure, too. "What we're getting from them isn't clear enough to be of any use."

Karen wavered on the spot, then lurched toward Pidge, arms spread as though to herd them off the bridge. Pidge took a single step back, clenching their jaw and blinking to keep from tearing up.

"What's going on?" they asked. "Where are Matt and Keith?"

Karen opened her mouth, but she seemed not to have anything to say. She turned as the elevator from the Black Lion's hangar hissed open, revealing Allura, who sprinted for Coran, hardly sparing Pidge a glance. Coran stepped aside, leaving her to take his place beside the twin pedestals. Allura rested her hands atop them, and almost at once a star map swelled to fill the room, spinning wildly for several breathless seconds. There was an incredible pressure in the air--Allura's Quintessence, Pidge supposed. They only vaguely remembered their very first day on the castle-ship, when Allura had done something similar to search for the missing Lions. They didn't remember there being this same expectation in the air, but then, they probably hadn't been aware enough of Quintessence to appreciate it.

It was only a few moments before the spinning stopped, a flashing red beacon appearing among the fainter blue stars. Almost at the same instant, another wormhole burst alight ahead, and Allura threw the castle forward with so much force that, possibly for the first time ever, Pidge actually felt the acceleration beneath their feet.

They stumbled, and their mother caught them, and Pidge shoved her away before they could think better of it, meaning they narrowly avoided face-planting. A sudden explosion on the comms wrenched their attention back to the viewscreen.

"There they are!"

"Oh my god...."

"What the--"

It was impossible to follow any more than than as everyone began to talk over one another, cursing, crying out, calling for Matt and Keith. Pidge pushed past Karen for a better view, then immediately wished they hadn't. The Red Lion drifted alone in open space, limp and broken. She looked like she'd been crushed, nearly ripped in two, her back twisted an an unnatural angle.

Pidge wavered, their mother's horrified gasp sweeping through them. They should have headed for the hangars, or for the infirmary. They should _be there_ , even if they couldn't do anything to help.

But the fear was pooling in their gut, refusing to let them find their footing, and they stumbled back, mind going utterly blank for a long moment as they stared at Red's broken body.

She looked like Ryner had, at the end.

That thought echoed, swallowing up all else, and Pidge fled. They didn't know where they were going, only that they had to get away.

* * *

_There was no time to clean her up before they tucked her broken body into the cryopod. No time to wash the blood from her face, from her hair, no time to worry about armor so mangled it couldn't be removed. The Blue Lion lay lifeless in her hangar, still mostly in the configuration she took as part of Voltron, but no longer recognizably a leg._

_Allura didn't understand, at first, why she was barred from the med bay. She'd been too slow, when the paladins first returned, to slip in among the chaos of the extraction. (She'd heard, some time in the aftermath, that they had to cut away a portion of Blue's cockpit to reach her, and that no one knew how long it would take to get the Lion back in working condition.)_

_No one had an estimate for when Lealle would be out of the cryopod._

_Coran distracted Allura as best he could, but she wasn't the only one who needed his comfort, and there were others to watch Allura while he talked down a distraught Alfor who seemed ready to provoke a war just to find some way to speed his wife's recovery._

_They told Allura not to go into the pod room. They_ all _told her that--even Rukka, who had never been able to tell Allura no. Keturah spent her days staring at nothing, her shaking hands knotted in her hair. The other paladins were never anywhere to be seen, and Allura was still too young to understand that the universe didn't stop because one person's life hung in the balance._

_All Allura knew then was that she wanted to see her mother. So she waited until Coran was away with Alfor and the woman whose turn it was to watch her was distracted with something else. It was easy to slip away, and she knew the hidden twists and turns of the castle well enough to make it to the med bay without being seen._

_It was quiet inside, the air thick with Quintessence in a way that made the hairs along Allura's arms stand on end. She stopped just inside the door, staring at the active pod. Her mother rested within, small and pale except where her blood stood out in such stark contrast to the white of her armor that Allura found it almost physically painful._

_More painful still was the way her armor had crumbled around her legs, shattered and shedding fragments of polymer. The way her breastplate had caved in, curling inward around a hole that punctured straight through to the shiny, new skin of her chest._

* * *

Allura didn't know why that image had stuck so vividly in her head, horrifying even all these years later. She'd seen more gruesome wounds since, and a day and a half in the cryopod had mended all of the outward signs of what Lealle had suffered, except for the damage to her armor, though it would be two more before the internal injuries were as thoroughly erased.

But Allura remembered with crisp, startling clarity how her mother had looked like a ripped and ragged old doll that had been cast aside. She remembered every crack in her armor, every place where it bent in a way it wasn't meant to bend. The pod had to have removed pieces of it during Lealle's recovery, because Allura was fairly certain both armor and bones had been wrenched out of place, and the pod couldn't have set broken bones with the mangled armor in the way.

She knew now what sorts of injuries damage like that implied. Back then, she'd only known that that wasn't what her mother was supposed to look like, either in or out of a cryopod.

The Red Lion had that same bone-deep _wrongness_ about her. Shiro went back out in Black to drag her in, Blue and Yellow helping while Val, in Green, flitted around nervously. Allura and Coran met them in Black's hangar, and Allura hardly kept herself from emptying the contents of her stomach. She'd seen the damage from the bridge already, and that had been hard enough to bear.

It was so much worse up close.

"Are they okay?" Val asked, breathless. She sprinted down Green's ramp, joining Allura by the Red Lion as the other paladins scrambled to follow.

Allura shook her head, hauling herself up onto the top of Red's head and opening the emergency hatch there. This must have been a glancing blow, far weaker than the one that had come so close to killing Lealle. Yes, Red looked as though her spine had been snapped. Yes, her paint had been blasted away, leaving bare burnished metal in a starburst outward from the point of impact. Yes, her Quintessence was unnervingly weak.

Her cockpit, though, was intact. Allura held onto the hope that that meant Keith and Matt were unharmed. Perhaps they'd only lost power. They would be waiting for her below.

Holding her breath, Allura dropped into darkness. She ignited the light on her gauntlet and shone it around the cockpit. Matt and Keith sat slumped in their chairs, and for a heart-stopping moment, Allura couldn't tell if they were breathing.

Val dropped down beside her, cursed, and crossed to Matt, the nearer of the two. She fumbled to pull off her glove, then pressed her fingers to Matt's neck just below his helmet. She held her breath, then looked up at Allura, a raw expression rending her face. "He's still alive. I don't know if... I can't..."

Allura shook herself, banishing images of her mother and hurrying to Keith's side. She worked him free of his flight harness, lifting him gently and cradling him against her chest just as Shiro appeared in the circle of light beneath the hatch. "Grab him," Allura said, nodding to Matt. "We need to get them to the infirmary so Coran can do a proper assessment. Val, see if you can get the main hatch open."

Val nodded, and Allura paused beside Shiro, watching the emotions break across his face. She'd been here. She knew the overpowering horror that was a Vkullor, and she'd thought it a relic of the past.

"They don't appear to be physically injured," she said. "It's probably just the shock of Red's injuries that has them in this state. A little rest, and... I'm sure they'll be fine."

"You don't really believe that," Shiro said, slipping an arm beneath Matt's knees and curling the other around his shoulders. He looked up at Allura and flashed a crooked smile. "But thanks for trying."

Allura pressed her lips together, but before she could dredge up a suitable lie, there was a cry from the bottom of the ramp. A faint glow of light said Val had succeeded in getting it open, and Allura hurried down with Keith. Get to the infirmary. That was the most important thing now.

She made it two steps toward the light before Akira was there, a wild look in his eyes--a wild look, and an eerie golden glow that left Allura feeling as though he were looking right through her.

“Akira?” Shiro asked.

Akira said nothing, only breathed, the faintest of growls behind the sound. He took Keith from Allura and turned, sprinting down the ramp too fast for Allura to say anything. She gave chase, resting a hand on Val’s shoulder as she stared, bewildered, after Akira.

The race to the infirmary passed in a blur, Allura's heart pounding, her legs shaking in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. Keith was already settled in a pod by the time Allura and Shiro arrived with Matt, and Akira very nearly took Matt away from Shiro as he’d taken Keith from Allura. Coran forestalled that with a firm hand on his shoulder.

For just an instant, Akira _snarled_ at him, the expression savage and chilling. Coran bustled on, steering Shiro toward the second ready pod and helping him settle Matt within.

As soon as the door hissed shut, Akira stilled, standing stock still and staring at the pods. He jumped when Shiro touched his arm. “Akira?”

Akira spun, staring at Shiro with wide eyes now devoid of the strange golden light. He opened his mouth, then shut it again and glanced around the room as though only just realizing where he was. He was shaking, his breath rattling in the still air.

Shiro frowned. “Are you okay?”

Akira stared at him, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t... Takashi...?”

Akira was cut off by the arrival of the rest of the team, every last one of them crowding toward the pods with a hundred questions on their lips. Akira clammed up at once, shrinking away from Shiro and fading to the edges of the group, his gaze returning to the pods and staying there.

"So... are they okay?" Hunk asked, wringing his hands.

Coran breathed in, his smile shaky. "They will be. We'll leave them in the pods for an hour, just to be sure, but all they really need is rest."

"Next question." Nyma spoke from the back of the group, glaring at the cryopods and not lifting her gaze away for even a moment. "What the _fuck_ was that? I thought Vkullor were extinct."

"They are," Meri said, and the same moment Lance said, "Maybe it's a robeast?"

"Hell of a robeast if it is," Val muttered.

Allura clenched her hands. "That is _not_ a robeast. If Haggar could engineer something on that level, we never would have survived this long."

"She had the egg," Shay pointed out.

"An egg that was supposed to take hundreds of years to mature," Lance argued. "Haggar had to have done something. Engineered it somehow."

"Does it matter where it came from?" Hunk asked. "It's dangerous, whatever it is."

Allura steadied herself, straining for calm. "It matters," she said, "because if it's a robeast, Haggar can make more, whereas if it's a real Vkullor, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we only have to deal with one of it."

"And how, exactly, are we going to 'deal with' it?" Nyma demanded. "I don't know what fight you were watching, but it looked to me like we just got our asses handed to us."

Allura glanced to Shiro, completely at a loss for how to answer. But Shiro wasn't looking at her; he stared at his brother, his brow furrowed, worry pooling in his eyes. It was Lance who stepped into the silence.

"We'll figure it out," he said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "But that's not going to happen tonight. For now, we need to get some rest, make sure Keith and Matt get back on their feet--and Red gets back in the sky. Then... we'll go from there, I guess."

His words didn't allay every fear, but it settled some of the restlessness in the other paladins’ eyes, and Allura nodded to Lance as the others left the room, one by one. Akira lingered the longest, then finally relented to Shiro’s concerned touch. After that, only Allura, Coran, and Meri remained.

As soon as they were alone, Allura’s razor thin composure shattered.

Coran gathered her in his arms at the first ragged sob, as though he'd know she was barely holding herself together. "It's okay, Allura," he whispered. "It's going to be okay."

Allura shook her head, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes and struggling for calm. "That was a _Vkullor_ , Coran. How are we supposed to fight that?"

"The same way we fight anything else," Meri said. "Trusting each other and being too damn stubborn to see when it's hopeless."

Allura choked on a laugh, turning her head to catch Meri's eye. She hovered nearby, and it only took one look to know that she'd been shaken, too. Maybe not as much as Allura, if only because she didn't have the same personal experience, but her eyes were misty, and her smile looked inches from failing.

Humming like a fretful klekavuuz, Coran reached out to pull Meri close, too. "Breathe," he said. "Both of you. I know this is a terrible surprise, and I know it's the last thing this team needed, but everything looks just a little worse when you're tired and you've just had a scare."

Meri scoffed, bowing her head to rest against Coran's shoulder. "I highly doubt anything could make a situation seem _worse_ than just seeing a Vkullor in the flesh."

"See, you say that now, but just wait until you've both had some rest and Keith and Matt are back on their feet. You'll figure this out. I know you will."

Allura wasn't convinced. They'd been lucky today; she doubted anyone realized just how much so. The Vkullor hadn't landed a solid hit; it hadn't attacked with the ferocity she'd seen in the skies over Daibazaal so long ago. Keith and Matt and the Red Lion had taken a beating, but a relatively minor one, as these things went. No one had _died._

The simple truth was, Voltron had triumphed over the last Vkullor because the fleets of a dozen worlds had come together to put down a threat they all knew could claim whole systems if it wasn't stopped. This team didn't have that many allies, and what allies they _had_ didn't have nearly the military presence to stand up to a creature like this.

Meri, though, breathed in, the sound rattled and unsteady--but as she released the breath, she pulled back and offered Allura a genuine smile. "Coran's right. We aren't exactly in the frame of mind to be problem-solving right now. Let's go get some rest. Come back to this when we've all got our heads on straight, yeah?"

Allura didn't have the energy to argue. She wiped a stray tear from her face, kissed Coran's cheek, and then took Meri's outstretched hand. She wasn't sure she would find sleep anytime soon, but maybe Meri would let Allura spend the night in her room. Lying with her, talking with her, might be just what she needed to get her mind off the horrors of the past.

* * *

Shiro managed to drag himself away long enough to shower, long enough to put on more comfortable clothes and check on a few of the other paladins. He couldn't stay in his own room for long; without Matt there, it was too quiet, and the silence reminded him of the heartless moments before they'd found the Red Lion. For just a moment, anything could have happened. Keith and Matt could have been dead, torn apart by the Vkullor or swallowed whole. They could have made it to their wormhole with the Vkullor on their tail, tearing the gate, destabilizing the tunnel. They could have escaped with a damaged Lion--life support slowly failing as they drifted somewhere no one could have found them.

Shiro knew it was Allura's memories of the last Vkullor, in part, that were to blame for his dark thoughts, but he couldn't help it. However much he worked on getting better, he would never like not being in control of a situation. He would never be able to stomach not knowing where his loved ones were, or if they were okay.

He kept himself busy as long as he could. Coran had said an hour, and he'd hinted that it would be a good idea to keep things quiet when they did come out of the pods. No point in overwhelming them when it was probably an overload of sensory input that had laid them out to begin with.

Hunk was with Shay, calling down to the surface of Metos to get an estimate on the damage. They might be able to force themselves to rest for a time, if things weren't as bad as they seemed, but Shiro thought it more likely that they would be off the instant Coran confirmed for them that Matt and Keith were okay. Akira had sent Guardsmen to Theros and Atsiphos, to warn them of what had happened and to advise them to join Metos in the distant system Coran had chosen as a haven. Coran would open wormholes for them soon, if he hadn't already.

He wasn't sure where Val or Nyma were, but they'd opted to give the Reds some space, so it was just Pidge, Karen, and Lance waiting with Coran in the med bay. Lance was still in his armor, and he flushed when he caught sight of Shiro, freshly changed and showered. He hardly held Shiro's eye for two seconds before turning away, his eyes lingering on the cryopods.

"How are they?" Shiro asked, stepping up beside Karen. She seemed as tense as any of them, but marginally more in control of her emotions--more impatient to have them out of the pods than worried about any lingering wounds.

"Fine," she said, glancing to where Coran stood, monitoring their progress. "It should only been a few more minutes." She hesitated, and Shiro got the sense she wanted to say something more, but after a moment she closed her mouth and nodded, seemingly to herself.

Shiro shifted his gaze to Pidge, who sat by themself on a bench along one wall. If Shiro didn't know better, he'd have thought Karen had dragged them here. They looked almost bored--sullen, even, staring at something they had cradled in the palms of their hands. Shiro couldn't make it out from where he stood, but they seemed transfixed by it somehow, and they shoved it into the pocket of their hoodie as Shiro approached, as though they were ashamed to be seen fiddling with it.

Not a stim toy, then, as Shiro had assumed.

"Hey," he said softly, taking a seat beside them. He left a few inches of space, mindful of Pidge's tension. They'd kept to themself for the last week. Shiro had hardly seen them, and hadn't had a chance to talk to them since Ryner's death. He found himself at a loss for words now, his mind going blank as he stared at his hands and Pidge tucked theirs beneath their legs, their knees bouncing restlessly.

"Hey," they said.

They were spared any further awkwardness when Akira burst in, still in his dress uniform with a faint sheen of sweat on his brow. "Sorry I’m late. Layeni was chewing me out for going AWOL." He chuckled, but the sound rang hollow.

"You're right on time," Coran assured him, and Shiro offered a smile as Akira turned his way. He smiled back, the expression dimming somewhat as his gaze fell on Pidge. Akira didn't say anything, and Pidge didn't look up from the circles they were drawing on the floor with the toe of their shoe.

Akira met Shiro's eyes, and he knew they were thinking the same thing: Pidge wasn't doing well. Shiro could have guessed that from the way they'd been avoiding the rest of the team, but he'd held out hope that Pidge just needed to sort things through on their own, that once they'd had some time to process, they would rejoin the others and things would get back to... well, not normal. Shiro had been though enough hell himself to know that normal ceased to apply after you'd seen the sort of things the paladins saw.

But he'd hoped things would get better.

Now, he wasn't so sure.

The pods hissed, and Shiro sprang to his feet, his heart in his throat. For a moment he stood paralyzed, staring at the two pods, uncertain which to go to. Lance had already taken up position beside Keith, and he was perked up now, clearly ready to catch him as he fell out. Pidge hadn't moved, though, and Akira seemed as torn as Shiro.

Karen placed a hand on his shoulder, offering him a smile as she nudged him toward Matt. "Don't worry so much," she said, and Shiro had to wonder if she thought he was hesitating because he was afraid. (Honestly? Maybe he was.)

Akira gave Karen an odd look, but said nothing as he dragged Shiro over to Matt's pod. Shiro had just enough time to notice that Karen wasn't following, but rather that she'd gone to join Lance by Keith's pod.

Then the door slid away, and Shiro had to turn his attention toward Matt, and keeping him from keeling over on the spot.

Matt wrinkled his nose at once, grunting as he cracked his eyes open and peered up at Shiro. "Don't tell me. That didn't go as well as we'd hoped."

Akira scratched his chin. "I mean... you're here and the Vkullor isn't. I'd call that a success."

Matt snorted, but he'd gone boneless against Shiro, swaying slightly and trusting Shiro to keep him upright. He must have been exhausted, but he was relaxed. Shiro would take that as a good sign. "What even happened? It's all sort of fuzzy."

"You remember the fight, though?" Shiro asked. "The Vkullor?"

Matt nodded. "We weren't doing much good against it as Voltron, so we split up. Keith and I were...." He trailed off, pulling back from Shiro with a frown.

"Keith's fine," Shiro assured him, turning to where Keith himself was currently tucked comfortably against Lance's side, looking confused by Karen's fussing, but not unhappy.

Matt cocked his head to the side, then shrugged and turned back to Shiro. "Keith and I were going to lead it away so you could get the Balmera to safety." He paused again. "You... _did_ get it to safety, right?"

"We did," Shiro said, looking to Akira. "The residents have a long road ahead of them--from what I hear, the damage was pretty severe."

"But they're safe," Akira said. "You bought them enough time."

Matt pursed his lips. "Yeah... that's the part I'm having trouble remembering."

"Not sure how much I can help you there," Akira said, making light of the situation that had rattled them all. "I wasn’t here for the fun part, but I’m going to go ahead and say you did something brave but probably stupid. Made everyone think you'd gotten yourself killed. Managed to get away, _somehow._ I suspect it has something to do with going the wrong way through a wormhole."

Matt raised an eyebrow, unimpressed by Akira's lackadaisical retelling, but Akira only spread his arms, beamed at him, and then pulled him into a rough embrace.

"Basically, you scared us all shitless, and I hope you know I'm going to get you back for that."

"Sure you are." Matt shoved him away. "What about Red? She's awfully quiet considering we were both just in a cryopod."

The soft conversation fluttering around Keith sputtered out, and Shiro's heart constricted as Matt's smile faded, apprehension taking its place. He looked from Akira to Shiro, the color draining from his face.

"Hang on. What happened to Red?"

"Little bit of structural damage," Akira said. "It looks bad, but Hunk already took a look, and he says it'll only take a few days to fix."

"Then why can't I hear her?" Matt asked. He turned, searching for Keith, who had already broken away from Lance and Karen to come hover at Matt's shoulder. They traded looks, and Matt's face fell.

Akira grabbed him by the shoulder. "Stop that," he ordered. "It's not as bad as it seems. Red wasn't expecting the last attack, or maybe it just hurt more than she's used to, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure she went into shock or something. Backlash probably hit you both even harder than it hit me."

Coran stiffened, staring at Akira over the top of his console. "Backlash? What backlash?"

Akira blinked, seeming only now to hear his own words. His brow furrowed. "Well... How do I put it? It’s like… Like she shut herself down, but they were all tied together, so she accidentally sort of... forced all three of them to reboot? I don’t think she meant for it to happen like that. She just sort of... noped out of there. Bad memories." He trailed off, then caught Shiro staring and stiffened. “Something like that, anyway. I dunno.”

"That sounds terrifying," Lance said, hugging himself as he inched closer to Keith.

"Perhaps." Karen tucked a lock of Matt's hair behind his ear, clucking her tongue as she did so. "But I don't think it's especially dangerous. Are you _ever_ planning on cutting your hair, Matthew?"

Matt rolled his eyes, fluttering a hand to chase his mother's fussing away. "Really? You want to complain about my hair _now_?"

Karen smiled, and though Shiro still didn't like the implications that Red had found some sort of off switch inside her paladins' heads--and though he _certainly_ didn’t like how skittish Akira was being about the whole thing--he did at least trust Karen enough to listen to her when she said they were okay. Coran did one last scan of them both, just to be safe, and then they had the all-clear. Shiro kissed Matt's forehead and turned him toward the door, ready to go to bed and put this awful day behind them.

They were halfway back to their room before Shiro realized that Pidge had disappeared from the infirmary sometime when no one was looking.

* * *

Pidge didn't sleep that night. Thoughts of the Vkullor, images of Matt and Keith lying quietly side by side in their cryopods, danced behind their eyelids. They hadn't been down to see how bad Red was, but they could imagine it from the way the other paladins whispered, and that was just another nightmare waiting to happen.

They turned Ryner's last gift over in the palm of their hand. It was a smooth metal seed, cool to the touch, with an engraving on one side: _For Pidge,_ _i_ _n case the worst happens._

Well, they were pretty sure the worst had happened. Ryner was dead, Pidge couldn't stand to be in the same room as their own lion, and now there was an actual Vkullor on the loose. Best case scenario, it was a wild one, and they only had to be lucky enough not to have it go after any of the coalition worlds.

Pidge didn't put much stock in that possibility. Haggar had had some hand in finding, or creating, this beast, and she would send it wherever she pleased. Maybe she was still testing it, maybe she didn't have perfect control. Maybe there would be some other delay--because if not, the entire coalition could be wiped out overnight.

Their options were limited. If Voltron couldn't stand up to a Vkullor, they were screwed. Unfortunately, it didn't seem as though Voltron _could_ match it--at least not as it was now.

_In case the worst happens._

Pidge didn't know what Ryner had left them. They'd tucked it away after the burial, and they hadn't looked at it since, except to fish it out of their armor before stuffing the armor into the pneumatic that would take it back to the ready room until it was needed again. Since then, the seed had waited inside the drawer of their bedside table, all but forgotten as they tried to pull themself back together.

It sat now in their pocket, and they pulled it out when they got back to their room, just the sight of it enough to tighten their throat and make their eyes burn in anticipation of tears.

Blinking furiously, they carried it over to their desk, fished out a toolkit designed for working on small devices, and switched on a light. The seed had no obvious controls, no switches or buttons that might have turned it on, no catch to open it up. Aside from the engraving, there was no indication whatsoever that it was anything more than an oddly-shaped lump of metal.

It occurred to them that Ryner might have meant for them to use the Olkari arts on the device, but they would deal with that possibility after they'd ruled out anything else. The arts were...

Well, they were tied up too much with thoughts of Ryner, and Pidge was afraid to try using them until the holes in their head had healed over enough that they weren't liable to fall into one and lose themself. It was risky enough just fiddling with Ryner's gift--but that was a risk Pidge had to take. Ryner might have left them a weapon, or some secret knowledge that would give them the same advantage. The team _needed_ whatever Ryner had hidden inside, so however much it hurt, however much it made the empty spaces where Ryner used to be ache...

Pidge owed it to their team to push through.


	7. Envy and Endurance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins faced off against a Vkullor that was attacking the Balmera Metos. They managed to distract it long enough for Metos to get away, though Red was badly damaged in the fight, and the mental shock of it landed Matt and Keith in cryopods. Pidge walked onto the bridge in the middle of the battle, and the guilt and fear were too much. They retreated to their room and began searching for answers about the strange metal seed Ryner left them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: A large chunk of this chapter takes place on Metos and deals with relief efforts following the Vkullor attack. Nothing particularly gorey is shown, but there are references to the dead and dying, along with the emotional toll of a large-scale disaster. Not my heaviest chapter, but tread carefully if disaster scenarios hit you hard.
> 
> Also, beware of Keith's POV scenes because of more of Keena's brand of bullshit. Emotional abuse, manipulation, and gaslighting warrant particular mentions this time around.

There was a message from Dez waiting for Ulaz when he woke up the day of his transfer. It wasn't signed, and it didn't use any origin code she'd used before--that was standard procedure, for the Accords--but he knew it was her just the same.

_Please reconsider._

That was all. Just two words, simple, vague. If anyone had intercepted the transmission, they wouldn't have read urgency into it. But Ulaz did. He knew Dez probably thought this was a death sentence--and after Meri had gone through the trouble of warning them.

She'd also, unfortunately, provided them more information, crucial information, on what it was Haggar was doing in Vindication. Meri probably never imagined it would sway Ulaz to this course of action, but Vindication had consumed his thoughts since Meri’s last transmission, and he’d scoured every resource at his disposal until he found a way in.

Everyone had a battle.

That was a saying among agents of the Accords. Everyone had a battle--a personal battle, a moral battle. Something that mattered more to them than the entire war. Something worth dying for. Sometimes it came down to a single moment, a simple choice. Sometimes it was a long, slow fight. Often, you didn't know what your battle would be until it was upon you.

For Keena, it had been information--what information specifically, Ulaz had never heard, but she considered it a worthy trade for a career still in its prime.

For Thace, it had been the innocents--the victims of Haggar's latest project and the civilians they would be sent to slaughter--concentrated on one particular initiative, yes, but Ulaz knew Thace well enough to suspect that that had merely been the breaking point.

For Meri, he suspected, it had been her own conscience, and Ulaz still had it in him to wish he'd drawn that line himself.

For Ulaz, it was more nebulous than that. There were many logical things about this choice. Vindication--the creation of a new Voltron with Zarkon as its head--was a threat unlike anything the universe had ever seen, and it would be worth any agent's life to bring it down, to even just pave the way for its fall. The paladins were both figurehead and spearhead of the Coalition, and the entire fight against Zarkon's empire was hamstringed so long as the paladins' family played the part of hostage.

Ulaz wasn't sure it was the war that tipped the balance, however. It was the whispers he'd heard of who the paladins were. It was what he'd seen in Meri, the few times they'd met. She was pure and honest and compassionate in a way Ulaz could not be--in a way that would do far more good for the future they fought for than someone like Ulaz.

He didn't want to see the paladins become like him, willing and able to make the ugly choices for the greater good, ready to sacrifice a few to save more.

They shouldn't have to make that choice.

He smiled to himself as he deleted Dez's message and gathered the two small bags he'd packed. He owned little, and he'd been permitted to bring even less. Vindication was shrouded in secrecy, even for those who were to join the team. Ulaz had been told when and where to catch his shuttle, had been provided a list of what he was allowed to bring, but he didn't know where he would be taken, or whether he'd retain contact with the outside world.

He didn't expect to return.

That was okay. He only needed to find the paladins' family and get them out.

Ulaz's fate was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. He was a pawn on a much larger game board, but he would play his role, and play it well.

* * *

The damage was worse than Shay could have possibly imagined. She'd seen it from the sky, had hardly been able to take her eyes off the images of Metos while waiting for word from the ground on how urgently her people needed aid. She'd heard the Guard's reports. She _knew_ it was bad.

Nothing could prepare her for what she found on the ground. Yellow's feet had hardly touched the Balmera's surface before the pain exploded in her mind. Metos was screaming, agony overwhelming the song, and Shay found herself unable to breathe as it hit her, again and again. Hunk recovered faster and rubbed her back, talking to her in soothing tones, singing a slow, insistent melody until she gave in and let it coax her into breathing again.

And that was just the _feel_ of it. Once she stepped out of her lion, once she saw the crater from the ground--a massive depression in the Balmera's surface, broken stone and shattered crystals spiderwebbed across a space so big Shay could hardly comprehend it... She wanted to be sick. People had lived here. Whole families had made their homes below the surface in this region. Some of them had died. Some were trapped; she could hear them singing in pain and distress that was hardly distinguishable from the Balmera's all-encompassing agony.

They were going to need more help. A glance at Hunk said he'd had the same thought, and he hurried back to Yellow to get the word out. If someone could go to Theros or Atsiphos and shuttle volunteers over, then they might actually make some progress. Until then, Shay's people needed her. She followed the pull of the song to the highest concentration of Balmerans. Hopefully there she would find someone who knew what needed to be done.

* * *

"Of course," Lana said, her voice level but her hand trembling on Akani's shoulder. "We'll pass the word along and make sure there's someone to ferry people over."

Hunk gave a thin smile on the comms screen. "Thanks, Mom." His eyes drifted to the side, his smile faltering. "It's _bad_  here. I mean, of course it's bad. I knew it would be. But I didn't expect it to be _this_  bad."

Akani's heart gave a twinge. She wished she could reach out through the comms and give her son a hug. It wasn't fair, the things he had to deal with. He'd chosen this, she knew, and he handled it well, but that wasn't the point. He shouldn't have _had_  to. Akani should have been able to shoulder this burden for him.

"I know, sweetheart," she said. "And I'm sorry. Would it help if we came down there, too?"

Hunk's eyes snapped back into focus, and he shook his head. "You don't have to do that, Mama."

Akani, though, only smiled. "I didn't ask if I _had_ to. I asked if it would help. I don't want to be in the way, but if you need someone to help with cooking, or handing out clothes, or getting people settled in shelters, or anything at all, I want to be there."

"That goes for the both of us," Lana added, leaning over Akani's shoulder. "We're always going to be there for you, baby. You know that, right? Whatever you need."

Hunk smiled, his eyes a little watery, but he nodded. "There's a lot to do," he admitted. "I'm sure the people here would be glad to have you."

Akani nodded once, firmly. "Then that settles it. We'll go to the other Balmera, gather up some volunteers--"

"I'll go drag Eli away from whatever he's doing," Lana added in an undertone. Akani stifled a smile.

"And we'll be down there to help as soon as we can."

"All right. Thanks."

They ended the call and did just that. Eli was reluctant to step away from his latest project, but once Lana mention Hunk's name, he gave up the fight. He'd once promised that he would be there for his family in a way he never had been on Earth, and he'd been living up to his word. Shay's parents, too, were among the first to volunteer--though the flood of aid that came from Theros and Atsiphos was so great that they needed several shuttles.

Hunk hadn't been exaggerating, either. If anything, he'd understated the situation on Metos. Akani could feel it the moment she stepped off her shuttle. There was a certain hush that hung over sites of a tragedy--burned buildings and flooded towns and homes that had just lost a member. Eli had felt it more than most of them, she suspected, and the grief that swept over his face when he stepped up beside Akani told her she wasn't imagining things.

People had died here. Many more had to be injured, or suddenly homeless. Akani wasn't sure what she could do to help, but she'd be damned if she didn't at least stick it out.

Hunk and Shay greeted them at the mouth of one of the tunnels, and something restless inside Akani settled. It was the way Hunk's bowed shoulders lifted a little at the sight of them. It was the way a voice rumbled in the air for a moment, warm and inviting. She felt the weight of eyes on her, though she couldn't pick out any faces in the gloom, and she had the sudden, acute sense that they were judging her, waiting to see if she was going to back out.

Akani straightened her spine and strode forward to meet her son and his partner. Lana, Eli, and Shay's parents were close behind her, and Akani knew they felt the same: they weren't walking away from this.

The pressure in the air lifted, and Hunk beamed as he stepped forward into Akani's embrace.

"It's good to see you," he said. "There's lots to do."

* * *

A delegation from New Altea arrived three days after the Vkullor attack. As Keith understood it, news of the attack had spread quickly, and by the time Allura spoke to the council, they already knew the story. (That was Keena's doing, probably. She knew everything first, just like always.)

Keith and Matt had been in and out of the castle for those three days, trying to catch up on distress calls and keep an eye out for the Vkullor's return while Shiro and Allura desperately searched for a way to stop it. Keith had heard of the coming delegation only in passing. Something about the council wanting to stay up to date on the happenings out there in the universe. They were sending several people to be their eyes and ears on the castle and elsewhere in the Coalition.

To be honest, Keith hadn't thought much of it. If the representatives of New Altea got in the paladins' way, then it could get troublesome fast, but as long as they stayed out of the way, then Keith wasn't going to put up a fuss about it. It might even be a good thing, if it meant New Altea wanted to be more directly involved in the war effort. They'd so far only contributed a few ships to a few of the larger battles, and Keith _knew_  they had more to offer than that.

But that was the sort of thing Shiro and Allura worried about. Keith tried to stay out of politics--that was why he'd steered clear of the homeworld these last few weeks. He'd heard from Mirek that they were deep in the process of constructing a new government, and he'd heard rumors that someone had floated his name for a top spot.

Keena, probably, or one of her agents. They hadn't talked since he'd left New Altea, but he wasn't so optimistic as to assume she'd given up on her plan of making him the next Galra emperor.

He didn't have to put in much of an effort to stay out of homeworld politics, though. He simply didn't have _time_  to go back there right now. They hadn't faced any new attacks since Keith, Lance, and Akira had helped break Vit's occupation, which meant the paladins were needed elsewhere.

Keith wasn't sure what it was, then, that kept drawing his mind back to the homeworld. He felt responsible, after he'd helped topple the existing government, leaving the planet in chaos. Well... some chaos. Things had been so bad that their problems weren't _worse_ now so much as _different_ , and the resistance was widespread enough that they were holding things together in the absence of the Imperial chokehold.

Keith still felt guilty about it. They were his people, and he didn't like to see them suffer.

Matt gave him a nudge as they headed back to the castle, exuding sympathy and understanding. He put a hand on Keith's shoulder and a damper on his guilt, even without Red there to facilitate their bond. She was still hurting from the fight with the Vkullor. Coran and his mechanics were working on her, but it was slow going with Hunk down on the Balmera and Pidge...

Well. No one was going to ask Pidge to go near any of the lions anytime soon.

"They'll be fine," Matt said, and for a second, Keith thought he was talking about Pidge. "You're making the right call. Other people need you more than the homeworld right now, and..." He trailed off, but there was a tinge of bitterness in his voice that he reserved specifically for Keena. "You know she's got a finger or ten in this pie."

Keith arched an eyebrow at Matt as he brought their ship in for a landing. They'd borrowed one of the Guard fighters and had mostly been tackling fights together with Akira and his troops. No Lion meant no two-man army to handle things solo.

It was frustrating, but at least Coran hadn't grounded the two of them. Keith had almost expected him to, after they'd landed themselves in the cryopods. Fortunately, Coran hadn't been able to find any actual injuries that would justify taking them out of the action. It was, as Akira had said, just as though Red had simply put them all to sleep.

She was still absent, the bond quiet ever since that battle. Coran kept saying it was a self-defense mechanism triggered by the structural damage--but he said it like that was supposed to make Keith feel better. Yes, Red had taken a bad hit and shut down--shut down so completely she'd taken her paladins down with her. 

When Shiro shut down like that after taking a bad hit in training, they called it PTSD, and no one expected a quick trip to the infirmary to make it all okay.

There were things Red still wasn't ready to talk about, even to Keith or Matt. They knew Keturah had hurt her, not just with her betrayal but more directly over the course of the ten thousand years Red had spent as a prisoner of her own former paladin. And maybe Keith was way off track thinking that the Vkullor attack had reminded Red too keenly of her past, but he didn't like the idea that Red had been hurt like this before.

Matt watched him as they climbed out of the shuttle, quiet and thoughtful. "You want me to handle the debrief?" he asked.

Keith shook his head. "I'll come with you."

"You sure? You don't need to waste your time when there's not even that much to report."

They both knew Matt was just giving Keith an out so he could go burn off some steam--take a trip down to the training deck, maybe, or find Lance and hope for some sort of distraction. Keith thought he was more likely to end up in Red's hangar, sitting in the corner and watching her, wallowing in the sense of emptiness that waited on the other end of the bond.

"I'm fine," he said, firmly enough that Matt stopped arguing. They headed up to the bridge together. Shiro and Allura liked to keep abreast of the other paladins' missions, if only so they could pick out patterns in the Empire's movements. They'd all gotten in the habit of reporting in as soon as they got back, or leaving a message if Shiro and Allura themselves were out on a mission.

Keith hadn't counted on the fact that the New Altean delegation was arriving today, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw the bridge already occupied by a half dozen strangers engaged in deep conversation with Shiro and Allura.

But it was one figure in particular that had Keith wishing he'd taken Matt up on his offer and spent the afternoon moping with Red instead of coming up here. Keena stood at the back of the group, her hair freshly dyed a new and offensive shade of pink, her hands clasped in front of her. Her gaze slid toward the elevator as the door hissed open, and for one interminable moment, Keith forgot how to blink.

There was no emotion in Keena's face as she studied him, and the way she looked away again a second later--utterly disinterested in Keith's presence on the bridge--cut him to the core. It was a worse judgment than if she'd openly chided him for ignoring the homeworld, like she was so thoroughly disgusted by his choices that she didn't even want to deal with him.

Keith hardly heard Matt apologize for interrupting the meeting. He spoke with Shiro for a moment, either delivering their report or arranging to do so later, but Keith was already out the door, his pulse thundering in his ears.

* * *

Eli had lost track of how many days he'd spent on Metos, now. There was always more to do, even for someone like him, who didn't have any particularly relevant skills. Akani had taken up near-permanent residence in one of the kitchens set up near the damaged tunnels. (Eli assumed she was always there; he'd yet to break for a meal without seeing her making food or serving it, and the way she was always surprised to see him there again suggested she didn't have a chance in between meals to notice the passage of time.) Shay was with the healers, or so he'd heard from Hunk, who was mostly working with the rescue and engineering teams to shore up damaged tunnels and try to reach the Balmerans still trapped somewhere in the mess of cave-ins and deep fissures that made nearly a tenth of the Balmera impossible to navigate.

Eli bounced from task to task as needed, but mostly he came in after Hunk and his engineers had reinforced a section of tunnel well enough for it to be safe for workers, and he helped to clear the rubble away and open a path deeper into the devastation.

It was dark, sweaty, depressing work, not least of all because every so often they would stumble upon a living space still scattered with broken dishes, ruined clothes, and even corpses. The grief that accompanied each of these gruesome discoveries was nearly silent, a shiver in the air and a hush that swept outward from the point of discovery through every other worker in the tunnel. It must have passed through the Balmera song somehow, because Eli was always the slowest on the uptake if he wasn't there when a body was found.

Lana had been with Eli at some point, but she'd wandered off while they were waiting on the engineers to give the go-ahead. Eli, along with most of the other workers here, appreciated the rest between segments. It gave them a chance to sit down, to rest their aching backs, to get some water or head back to the base camp for food or sleep.

It occurred to Eli that Lana might have gone to bed, actually. He didn't remember what time he'd started working today, but he was pretty sure he'd stopped to eat at least twice already, and Lana had been up even earlier than him this morning. If early was the right term... He didn't actually know what time of day it was on the Balmera right now. He didn't know what time it was _anywhere_ ; he hadn't bothered to bring anything with him that might get lost or damaged while he worked.

Maybe he should consider turning in for the night.

But there was still work to be done, and Hunk hadn't stopped yet. Eli was a little sore, and he knew he would sleep well tonight, but he wasn't exhausted yet. He could push a little further.

* * *

In retrospect, it was stupid of Keith to think he could avoid his mother for long, least of all by hiding with his own Lion.

Red wasn't doing much better five days out from the Vkullor attack than she had been at three. It was painful just to be in the same space as her, though she still hadn't roused enough for Keith to sense anything through the bond. Coran's crew had mostly realigned her frame and had begun replacing segments of armor that were too badly damaged to be fixed, but all the new pieces were still raw metal, a dark slate gray that stood out from polished and painted metal around it. And that wasn't counting the pieces that had been removed but not yet replaced.

She was looking much more like herself, no longer mangled and broken, but it was still immediately apparent to anyone who walked in the room the extent of the damage she had suffered.

So of course Keena took her in in a single glance, then shifted her gaze to Keith and raised an eyebrow. He shrank back, crossing his arms over his chest and slouching against the wall. He wasn't much of a mechanic, and he knew he'd only have gotten in the way if he tried to get any closer, so he'd lingered in one corner of the hangar, near the stacks of armor plates waiting to be attached.

"I heard you had a little bit of a close call with that Vkullor," she said, drawing up short a few feet away from him. Her voice was soft, with just enough restraint in it that she almost managed to sound worried for him, except that Keith knew nothing was ever so simple with her.

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug and kept his eyes on the Red Lion. He wanted to leave. Find a new hiding spot and hope he could keep it up for however long Keena decided to stay. But she was like a predator scenting blood. The more Keith ran, the harder she would chase him. "I guess."

Keena wrapped her arms around her midsection, ducking into his line of sight with a small smile. "I'm not blind, Keithka. Your Lion took quite the beating. Surely you couldn't have emerged from that unscathed."

He shrugged again, wishing she would just drop it. "The cockpit wasn't hit. Matt and I were fine."

"After a stay in the cryopods, you mean."

Keith tensed, unable to stop himself from looking at Keena, who smiled a little wider.

"Everyone's talking about it, you know. How the two of you almost died taking it on all alone."

He bristled. "Well, I wasn't just going to let it destroy the Balmera. Lives were at stake, and the only thing we could do was try to lead it away so the others could get Metos to safety."

"How noble of you," she said, her smile turning lopsided as her tone slid right to the edge of mockery. "I guess when you find a cause you really care about, nothing can stop you, hmm?"

And there it was. He glared at her, his claws digging into his sleeves as he struggled to hold himself back from attacking her.

She'd only use it to her own advantage somehow, anyway.

"This is about the homeworld, isn't it?"

Keena blinked, leaning backward as though she had no clue where his question was coming from. "Keithka, is everything okay? You seem tense." She stepped forward, reaching up to brush his hair off his face. "I just think it's amazing the things you can do when you put your mind to it."

"I'm not going back to the homeworld," he snapped. "Okay? They don't need me. My _team_  does."

"Keithka..."

He stepped aside as she reached for him again. He was shaking now, shaking in anticipation of a fight that would never come. Keena was too sly for that, and that just left him restless and defensive with no way to expel that energy.

"Stop," he said, because Keena looked like she was gearing up for another rousing speech on how much the Galra people _needed_  him, how he was destined for _so much more_  than the life of a soldier. He didn't want to hear it. Not today. Not ever, if he could help it.

He walked out before Keena could say another word, trying to ignore the tempest of emotion roiling just beneath his skin.

* * *

"My apologies for pulling you away from the aid efforts, Elder Shay."

Meri's voice was tired as she read out Bek's translation of the other Elder's words. Shay wondered what had her run so ragged--if the other paladins had run into trouble over the last few days, or if Meri's services as a translator had been in high demand. Shay herself had been so preoccupied with the care of the wounded and the organization of the survivors that she had hardly paused to give a thought to Atsiphos's recovery or what the visitors from the free Balmera may have been doing in the interim.

"It is no trouble," Shay said, forcing her song to be light, though the devastation here on Metos weighed heavily on her. It would do no good for her to put all of her own turmoil onto her guests. "I only regret I have not been a better host to you."

The Elder was already holding up his hands before Bek had time to have completed Meri's translation. "Elder Shay, please, be at peace. Our own kin have recently suffered a similar blow. We do not fault you for seeing to your people's own needs in this time of crisis."

Shay felt as though her stomach had just fallen into her feet. Of course. She had forgotten entirely about the whispers of Vkullor she had found the first time she had visited the free Balmera. The shattered corpse of one Balmera left behind on the Migratory Paths, the damage visible across the surface of one of the survivors.

She felt a fool for forgetting, and even worse, she feared this attack had ruined whatever chance she may have had of convincing the free Balmerans to unite with Metos, Theros, and Atsiphos as one Migration. The free Balmerans may have had the right of it; when you faced a force like the Vkullor, perhaps the best thing to do was to cut all ties to the universe at large and pray you remained hidden until the danger had passed.

"Your kindness is appreciated," Shay said, inclining her head. She was not the only Elder present, but the Elder from the free Balmera seemed to regard Shay as the woman in charge, and she was too tired to try to convince him otherwise. "I am sure it cannot be easy for you to be reminded of your own loss."

"It is not. But it is heartening to see the support your people have. From one another and from this coalition of worlds. I asked to see you because I am returning home. I have already made arrangements with the other Lion-Singers." The Elder gestured to Meri. "I will speak with my kin, and we will send what aid we can."

Shay didn't know what to say to that. She had been prepared for the Elder to cut ties--as prepared as she could be when her mind was still several levels below, with those who needed her aid still. Those out in the tunnels had nearly reached another trapped family, and Shay was anxious to greet them when they emerged.

 _This_ , she had not been prepared for in the slightest.

The Elder smiled at her, inclining his head, and she thanked him. "Safe travels. I hope we can speak again soon."

"And under happier circumstances," he replied.

His song injected serenity into those gathered here, and Metos herself stirred in response, reaching out to comfort all her people. Shay clasped hands with the Elder, and they bid their farewells. It was with a lighter step that she returned to the tunnels below to resume her work.

* * *

"I'd like to go down there."

Karen looked up, Keena's voice like needles prickling down her spine. She didn't turn away from her screen, where she was helping Coran compile supply requests, both from the castle and from the people hit by the most recent waves of attacks, the Balmera Metos included. Many of these worlds didn't have the infrastructure or the offworld connections to rebuild after an Imperial attack, and relied on the Coalition to coordinate aid.

Shiro and Allura, who had been conferring over the next round of assignments for the paladins, turned toward the sound of Keena's voice. Shiro glanced over his shoulder at the forward viewscreen, through which the three Balmera were visible. "To Metos?"

"Yes," Keena said brightly. "If it's not too much trouble."

"It's no trouble," Shiro said slowly.

Akira, still bowed over the map of a system that had requested aid, interjected. "It _is_  dangerous, though. You sure you want to go down there?"

Keena laughed. "Everywhere is dangerous these days. At least here the primary threat has already passed."

Shiro shot Akira a look, forestalling whatever he was going to say next. "If you want to go down, I'm not going to stop you. You're not under my command. But if you're after information, we can just ask one of our people to send it to us."

Keena clucked her tongue. "Oh, no, that's all right. I'd rather see it for myself. Numbers on a page can only tell you so much, you know. If I'm out there, though..."

Karen barely resisted the urge to snort. Ostensibly, Keena was here on behalf of the council of New Altea--their eyes and ears in the field. Apparently no one thought it was inappropriate to send a spy to the Castle of Lions. What, were they supposed to give her a pass just because they _knew_  she was a spy?

But she was an ally, and Karen never had found any proof that the things Keena did were anything other than in the Coalition's best interests. Her reasons for not trusting the woman were far more personal than that.

"The next shuttle leaves in two hours," Shiro said. "Hangar Three in Yellow Tower. You can catch a ride then."

Karen turned just in time to see Keena tip a finger in acknowledgment, then turn and flounce out of the room. After only a moment's hesitation, Karen followed.

"Keena!" she called. Keena stopped, though she didn't turn, and some small, rational corner of Karen's mind warned her that she was making a mistake. She'd already antagonized this woman once--had let herself _be_  antagonized, actually, and had ended up punching Keena in front of a room full of witnesses.

...When she thought of it that way, actually, what more was there for her to lose? Keena already hated her, and the feeling was most definitely mutual. Who better than Karen to get in Keena's face and demand answers?

Karen circled around in front of Keena, sizing her up. "What's your game, Keena?"

"Game?" Keena's voice grated in that way it always did--even before Karen knew _why_  it did. She'd never been able to make it through a conversation with this woman without feeling like she'd been played somehow. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're after something. I want to know what."

Keena laughed, the sound tinkling and disingenuous. "Of _course_ I'm after something, Karen. I just told you that." She finally turned to face Karen head-on, her lips quirking upward into something like a smirk. "I'm here for information. Why else do you think the Council sent me?"

"I don't care what the _Council_ thinks you're doing here. You've got another motive. I know you do."

The smile was just the slightest bit strained now, and Karen seized on the show of weakness. She set her hands on her hips and met Keena glare for glare, looking for the lie behind her inscrutable gaze.

"You're delusional. I'm not playing a game here. I'm not double crossing anyone. I just want to know as much about the enemy's new _pet_ as I can. I want to save _lives,_ Karen."

"Since when are you a humanitarian?"

Keena stepped back, her mouth dropping open in a facsimile of offense. "Excuse _you._ Just because I try to make _smart_ decisions instead of emotional ones doesn't mean I'm heartless. I'm trying to make life better for as many people as possible."

"What about Keith's life?" Karen asked. "What about your own son? Does he not matter?"

Keena's eyes widened a fraction, and for an instant, Karen thought she would finally get a rise out of the woman.

Instead, Keena plastered on a smile and backed away, shaking her head, and turned her back. "Are _you_ the one who turned him against me? I should have guessed."

"Keith doesn't need me to tell him you're a conniving bitch," Karen muttered. With another human, her words would have been so low as to go undetected, but Keena's ear twitched. She stopped, not looking at Karen, but a moment later she continued on. She didn't dignify Karen with a response.

* * *

It was Lana who finally dragged Hunk, Eli, and Akani away from their work, because apparently Lana was the only one in this family with any amount of common sense. She was also, as far as she could tell, the only one who'd gotten any sleep since this whole ordeal began.

"I've _slept_ ," Hunk protested, seemingly offended by the very accusation that he wasn't taking care of himself. Akani came along meekly, her sleeves spotted with broths, sauces, and who knew what else where her apron hadn't covered her, and Eli had withdrawn into a sulk, lagging behind the other three with his arms crossed over his chest.

Lana arched an eyebrow at her son. "Have you, now? When _was_ the last time you slept?"

Hunk scratched his cheek, his eyes trailing along the side of the tunnel Lana was leading them down. "Uh... Not _too_  long ago?"

"Uh-huh." Lana didn't bother to say more than that. The way Hunk slouched down, he must have known he'd pushed himself too far.

She understood it, really she did. Every time she pried herself away from the relief efforts, it got a little bit harder. There was always more to do, and even if she'd wanted to, she couldn't possibly have forgotten all the people who were suffering. She _ached_  for this Balmera and the people who lived here, and she couldn't fault her family for wanting to do everything in their power to help.

(And, true, it was difficult to find sleep when her mind kept sticking out in the crumbling tunnels and the crowded chambers full of refugees. Lana had spent most of last night staring at the ceiling, restless energy burning beneath her skin. She hadn't felt particularly tired, and she hadn't rested for long--but at least she'd _tried._ )

Shay was waiting with her parents when Lana returned to the main chamber. Lana traded a private smile with Shay's mother, Kiy--another practical woman, and someone Lana had spent a considerable amount of time with these last few days. They both felt a little out of place here, desperate to help but lacking any real useful skills. They'd bounced from team to team, helping out where they could, restless and helpless.

"You, too, huh?" Hunk asked, flopping down beside Shay.

Shay ducked her head down between her shoulders and shot a spiteful look at her parents. "They say I am working myself too hard. I have tried to _tell_ them it is necessary."

Lana smiled to herself, glad to see that that tone of voice was universal when it came to children sassing their parents.

"Your well being is also necessary," Kiy said calmly--almost distractedly, like she didn't care how much Shay wanted to pout about this.

Lana had said it before, and she would say it again: she liked this woman.

“We’re just concerned,” Lana said, settling her hands on Hunk’s shoulders. “You’re pushing yourselves too far, and sooner or later it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.”

Hunk mumbled an apology, his head down, his shoulders slumping under Lana’s hands.

She smiled, cupping his cheek in her hand and kissing his forehead. “I’m not angry, Hunk. I’m just trying to look out for you. And _you two_ ," she said, her voice turning sharp as she rounded on Eli and Akani. "You're the adults here. You're supposed to be setting an example for them!"

"Oh, like you're any better," Eli muttered.

Lana crossed her arms. "Excuse me?"

"Don't pretend you aren't just as bad as us. I saw you out there, running from place to place."

"At least I slept."

"Did you, though?"

Lana blinked. "What? Of course I did."

Eli only raised an eyebrow at her, and Lana felt herself flush.

"I _tried._ "

Hunk looked up, curiosity written on his face. "Wait... you didn't sleep either?"

Lana held up her hands. "Okay, hold up. This isn't lecture Lana hour. Maybe I _couldn't_  sleep. At least I made the effort to take care of myself."

"No," Hunk said. "I mean, _why_  couldn't you sleep? Stress?"

"I guess...?"

Hunk stared at her, _through_  her, in a way that made her shiver. Something expectant hung in the air around them, and Lana hesitated, feeling the weight of so much attention on her.

"I guess... it was mostly that I just wasn't all that tired."

"That's weird."

Lana bristled. "You're one to talk."

"Mom," Hunk said, sounding more exasperated than ashamed. "I'm not tired either. I know you think I'm just pushing myself because I'm worried about the Balmerans here, but--I mean, I _am_  worried about them, and I didn't _want_  to step away, but if I was tired, I would have! I really just didn't realize how long I'd been out there."

There were murmurs of agreement from the others, and Lana for a moment felt as though the world were tilting on an angle. "That's..." She licked her lips. "That's ridiculous. Hunk, you've been at it for-for two days, at _least!_  How can you not be tired?"

Akani laid a hand on Lana's arm. "Lana," she said softly. "I don't think he's lying. I knew it must have been a long time, after I'd made so many different meals, but I just... I didn't think about it too much. I kept expecting to start feeling it after a while, you know? But..."

"I never felt it," Eli said. "That... really _is_ weird. All of us?"

"Oh." Hunk breathed out the word, soft and wondrous, his eyes wide as he stared first at nothing and then directly at Shay, who herself looked as though she had just seen a ghost.

"Oh?" Lana asked. "What, 'oh?'"

"Yellow," Hunk said, and Lana honestly couldn't tell whether that was an answer to her question, or if he was talking to his Lion. He blinked, his eyes slowly refocusing. "Uhhhhh... Heh. _Hi._  So, uh, Mom. Mama. Uncle Eli. Mom and Pop Shay. Funny story..." He folded his hands in front of his pursed lips, then rotated until he was pointing at Lana. "I think Yellow might have gone ahead and made you all adjuncts."

* * *

There was a new face in the lab the next time they took Rolo.

He wasn't sure why it stood out to him. He paid little attention to his captors, except to try to avoid provoking them without cause. Honestly, he wasn't sure he could have recognized most of them at a glance.

But the newcomer was different. Quieter. His hands moved swiftly as he worked, his eyes trained on the task at hand. He spoke little, but he responded to orders without question or delay.

And he alone of everyone in the room seemed to see Rolo--really _see_ him, and not as a thing, not as another piece of equipment to be manipulated as need be, but as a... Well, not as a person, not quite. There was no compassion in his eyes, no softness to his touch. Rolo wouldn't have expected any more kindness from this man than from anyone else in this base.

But he did watch Rolo--clinical, but attentive. It was almost as though he were here not to _use_  Rolo, but to learn from him.

"I don't like him," Rolo said that night when he, Sam, and Rax separated to make their nightly rounds. Zuza had just fallen asleep, and the others left their bodies curled around her, both for her comfort and for all their safety. It was a new compound, after all, which meant they had to be more careful than ever. Just because their old cell hadn't been watched didn't mean this one wasn't. Better to feign sleep while they gathered information.

"Oh?" Sam frowned. "Why's that?"

Rolo wrinkled his nose. "I dunno... Just seems more... interested... than most people here. Did you see the way he was looking at me earlier?"

Sam hummed noncommittally, but Rax was more blunt about it. "No," he said. "You're imagining things."

"Maybe..."

"We'll keep an eye on him," Sam said. "It's going to be all right."

Rolo wasn’t sure how that was supposed to be reassuring--it wasn’t like Sam could _stop_ the druids or their doctors if any of them decided to take things to the next level. But there was no point in stressing over it, either, so Rolo let the matter drop. They continued on quietly, the minutes bleeding away as they moved through the compound.

There was a certain familiarity to this. This dreamlike wandering through the prison that held them captive, this silent vigil over empty cells and distant Sentinels and the staff that was totally unaware that they had company.

They moved quickly, flitting from room to room. Restless energy burned inside Rolo, one part elation at being free to do this, one part anxiety over what would happen next if they didn't find anything useful.

He knew he'd been sent out in the robeast. He'd been aware of the Sentinel considering him, analyzing him, until at last it swallowed him whole. He knew there was a long span of time missing--a span that seemed to match up with Rax's missing time, which was itself preceded by an encounter with a massive _other_  presence that pushed him beneath the surface of a restless, dreamless sleep.

He didn't know where they'd sent him, who they'd made him fight, or what he may have done unawares. That was what scared him the most, especially because he knew they'd sent Sam to fight his kid. Had they done the same with Rax and Rolo? Had they sent him to fight Nyma? Thanks to Zuza, he knew she was with the paladins, but he also knew Nyma well enough to suspect that she found their company stifling. Surely she still went out alone sometimes in the _Harbinger_ \--on supply runs, or to gather information. If they sent Rolo after her when she was alone...

It was impossible to say what their plans were, and guessing only made him sick to his stomach. Which was why they'd come out here in the first place--all three of them together for the first time tonight. Rax had finally gained some measure of control, though his range and his endurance were still lacking. He followed them while he could, helping them map out the new prison they found themselves in. They’d been moved just before Rolo and Rax had been sent out the first time.

The old complex had been larger--strangely so for the small scope of this project. Here, everything felt more to scale. There were only a few empty cells that they'd found so far, only a few labs, all of them clustered close together. Everything seemed to be kept in easy reach of everything else--everything, that was, except for their cell, which was located at the end of a long, lonely corridor. It seemed to actually burrow into whatever planet or moon they'd landed on, constructed walls giving way to raw stone.

Rolo wondered if their cell had been added on after the fact, it seemed so out of place. The druids knew the experiments conferred technopathy on the victims, though so far they didn't appreciate the range. Didn't know their prisoners could separate their consciousness from their body at will, for that matter. Rolo and the others had worked hard to keep that little secret, as it was one of the few advantages they had in this place.

"We need to go farther," Rolo said. "All of these rooms are too close to the labs for them to leave anything valuable lying around."

Sam nodded in agreement, but Rax hesitated. "I think I am at my limit," he said. "You go on. You can fill me in later. I will return to the cell and keep Zuza company while you explore."

He was being brave about it, Rolo knew, but it had to bother him that he couldn't keep up with the other two. He lingered for a moment, then faded.

Sam clapped a hand on Rolo's shoulder. "Come on, son. We should be quick about this. No telling when the druids are going to make their next move."

He was right, and Rolo knew it, but it was hard to drag himself away all the same. The three of them had been separated too much recently, and continuing on without Rax left an uneasy feeling in the pit of Rolo's stomach.

"Rolo?"

Rolo shook himself and forced a smile. "Don't you worry about me, old man. Let's go."

They continued on together, exploring the prison, making note of labs and living quarters. It was as small as it seemed; the only part they couldn't reach was down a narrow, dark corridor. The robeast hangars, presumably.

The _lion_ hangars. Rolo had heard Sam's story, and he'd been adamant that the robeast, the thing he called the Watcher was modeled after a Voltron Lion. Rolo couldn't be sure the other two robeasts were the same, but... It made sense. The files he'd found before suggested a connection to Voltron.

He wished he'd had more time to look over those files last time--but that was what they were doing here, after all. Searching for information. Trying to turn things to their advantage, one way or another.

They found a computer in a dark office, away from prying eyes that might get suspicious if a monitor turned itself on in the middle of the night and started displaying sensitive documents. Sam did the actual interfacing. He'd always been better at it, and the fact that he'd usually taken the lead on things like this meant that he was more familiar with the directories. He found what they were looking for in a matter of minutes, where Rolo might have taken an hour and still turned up nothing.

"This what you found before?" Sam asked, reappearing beside Rolo as a directory appeared on screen.

Research Initiatives > Vindication > Test Subject Profiles > Generation 3 > Group B

Rolo licked his lips and nodded. "Sure is. You, me, Rax, and Zarkon, of all people." He paused, biting his lip. "Weird that there still isn't a Red. Isn't that what they brought Zuza in for?"

"I don't know," Sam said. He placed his hand atop the monitor, his fingers fuzzing slightly into the machine, and one by one the files opened up, showing the same information Rolo had already seen once before. Sam was designated Green, Rolo Blue, and Rax Yellow. The color of their lions, presumably. And of course Zarkon would make himself the head. Rolo could only assume that he'd also skipped out on the less pleasant aspects of the experiments.

Rolo pulled his eyes off the screen and studied Sam instead. "What, you think they took her just because? Why send her here, if that's the case?"

Sam pursed his lips. "You heard her story. Haggar wanted someone else--another paladin's family member--but Zuza got in the way. Maybe they're keeping her as a backup. She's not important enough to the paladins to turn into a corrupted version, but if they can't get their hands on someone better, they'll use her anyway." Sam shook his head. "Or maybe she's just not far enough in the process to have a file here. Who knows?"

Rolo sighed. "Well, these files aren't telling us anything we didn't already know. Let's look at the other set. I didn't have time to dig into those ones much."

Sam lingered for a moment on his own file, staring at the medical data and Quintessence graphs like he expected to find a revelation there. Eventually, though, he relented, navigating to the directory for Group A, where again they found color-coded files--though this set already had a Red included.

"I only had a chance to look at Blue last time," Rolo said, reaching out as he did so and pulling up the file. It was just as incomprehensible as last time, except that he could now infer that Group A referred to the lions, where Group B was the pilots. Once more, the only interesting point he found was the species marker.

"Niskaia," Sam said. "What is that?"

"No idea. This is the only place I've ever seen that word before. Some species we never got around my old haunts, I guess. What are the other ones?"

Sam backed out of the file without answering, then pulled up Green's. Rolo's blood ran cold.

"Weblum."

Sam gave him a curious look. "I take it you _do_  know this one."

"I do," Rolo said. "Not sure you're gonna like what I have to say."

"I'm bound to this thing, whatever it is. I'd rather arm myself with as much information as possible."

"Fair enough, I guess." Rolo leaned back, rubbing the back of his neck. "Where do I even start? Weblums are... massive. I've never seen one, personally, but folks say they're creatures the size of a moon. Look like a maggot, eat dead planets... They aren't _violent,_  exactly, but they're dangerous. Best thing you can hope for is that it never notices you, because there aren't many things out there that can go toe to toe with a Weblum and live."

Sam was quiet, and Rolo wondered if he still wanted that information. Like he'd said, he was bound to this thing--bound to a planet-eater. He knew that now, but did it help? Rolo couldn't see how it could, and as much as he hated not know what the Sentinal _was_ , at least he didn't know it was a monster.

"Let's check the others," Sam said at length, already returning to the other screen. He started at the top this time, with the file titled Black, and Rolo was surprised to find a document that looked nothing like the other two.

"What... What _is_  that?" Rolo asked. It was a mess of incomprehensible diagrams and readouts, and Rolo didn't know what to do with it, but Sam straightened up. He backed out, navigated back to the other directory to pull up Zarkon's file, putting the two side by side on the screen.

"There," Sam said. "Look at those Quintessence graphs."

"They look the same to me."

"Exactly." Sam leaned back. "That's why he's not afraid to put himself in this project. His lion isn't like ours. He's not bonding himself to a robeast. He's putting his _own_  essence in that shell.... It's like a piece of him."

Rolo rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "I guess that would explain it. Dunno how that's gonna help us, but at least we know."

"Never underestimate the power of knowing, Rolo," Sam said gently. "There will come a time for us to use this information. I know it."

He sounded so sure. Rolo didn't know how he did it. Pitted against his own family, helpless to fight back, trapped in an alien prison for months and months, and he still found a way to be more optimistic than Rolo. But damn if Rolo didn't trust Sam more than he trusted himself.

"All right, then. Three down, two to go."

Sam obligingly closed out of Zarkon and Black's files and opened Yellow. Here, at last, they found something interesting--and maybe useful, as well.

"They bonded him to a Balmera?" Rolo laughed once, incredulous. "Think they did that on purpose?"

"You mean because he's a Balmeran?"

Sam sounded confused, and Rolo realized he probably didn't know all that much about Balmerans.

"Exactly," Rolo said. "Balmerans and their Balmera... Well, I don't know all the details. You'll have to ask Rax about that. But Balmera are alive, right? They're sentient. And the Balmerans who live inside them can communicate with them."

Then Sam got it. His eyes lit up, and a ghost of a smile touched his lips. "We'll have to tell Rax about this. If he can talk with that thing--"

"Assuming there's still a mind in there to talk _to,_ " Rolo said, as much to stem his own hope as Sam's. He thought there was still a mind there; the Sentinel--the Niskaia--seemed intelligent, whenever he sensed it on the fringes of his own awareness. It seemed aware of _him_ , certainly. Whether or not it had any more freedom to fight back against its captors than its pilot...?

Well, Rax stood a better chance than any of them of finding that out.

"Let's check Red, too," Rolo said after a moment. "As long as we're here. It'll give us a leg up whenever they finally chose a pilot."

Rolo thought he'd seen the worst of it when the Green robeast had turned out to be a Weblum. He'd assumed this would be another one, or maybe something else he'd never heard of, like the Niskaia that was Blue. The one thing he'd never expected was to see a nightmare given form.

_Vkullor._

* * *

"A network?" Hunk stared up at the Yellow Lion, feeling as though every nerve in his body were on fire, his skin a size too small, his mind suddenly hyper-aware of his every movement and of the five extra people crowding the small cave where Yellow had been staying.

She was sleepy, sluggish. He could feel it in the back of his head, now that his attention was on her, and the soft, muddled voice with which she sang--the same one that had interrupted the argument earlier, almost sheepishly--only underscored his own bizarrely clear head.

Yellow rumbled, still singing. He got the impression she wanted to talk directly to her new adjuncts, but she was too tired to make the effort, so she sang to Hunk and Shay, and they tried to decipher her message into something a little more concrete than the vague notion of crystalline structures and lattices and the broad, steady base of a mountain.

It seemed "network" was a close enough approximation for Yellow, who exuded satisfaction and settled back into rest, as though that were all that needed explaining.

"No, hang on," Hunk protested, prodding at the bond with his mind. "What does that _mean?_  Okay, so you wanted a network of adjuncts instead of just one. _Why?_ "

Yellow sang again of sturdy structures and chemical bonds and--and-- Hunk squinted, a glimmer of understanding making it through Yellow's tired half-explanation. "It's stronger this way?" he guessed.

"More balanced," Shay added. She glanced to Hunk. "The adjunct bonds reflect the domains of the lions, do they not? Akira has the instincts of the Red Lion. Karen was granted Green's knowledge. Coran was made sensitive to his paladins' emotional states."

 _ **One works for the others,**_  Yellow said, her voice hardly a whisper at the back of Hunk's mind. _**I wanted to try something different.**_

Hunk snorted, then glanced over his shoulder at his family waiting a few steps back. "She says she wanted to be different," he explained. "And here I thought Red and Blue were the extra ones on this team."

Yellow rumbled, amusement mixed with indignation, and gave his mind a gentle nudge.

Shay smiled, but she was already shaking her head. "I do not understand. What is your domain?"

 _ **Endurance,**_  Yellow said, and Hunk began to see. Yellow paladins were meant to be the team's foundation, to be their shield. Hunk and Shay tanked damage in battle to give the others space to maneuver and time to come up with a plan. They were steady, loyal--but how did you give that to an adjunct? You could find someone who would remain steady through life's storms, but you couldn't just grant them perseverance.

 _ **I could give them my strength,**_  Yellow said, her song following his thoughts. _**I could make it so they could withstand pain, could perform feats of strength, could go without for longer than other organic beings... But would that help**_ **you** _ **? Our adjuncts are not meant to be soldiers.**_

"Akira's a soldier," Hunk pointed out.

Yellow's song hiccuped, a sensation very much like a scoff. _**Because he needs to be able to keep up with Red and her wildfires. The others are not expected to support their paladins in battle. We Lions can do that much on our own. We look for adjuncts to ease the burdens that follow the fighting. The pain. The fatigue. The grief.**_

And so she had created a network--a whole web of interconnected people who could share in the burden. It would have been too much for one person to shoulder, but if the burden were spread among five, among a dozen...

_**You all can borrow on my strength, as well, when the situation calls for it. There is little I can do here, so I can take your fatigue... Although your mother is right. Even I cannot make it so you need no sleep at all. You should rest, before you crash.** _

Hunk nodded slowly, relaying Yellow's explanation to the others--to _his adjuncts_. That was a weird thought.

Then another thought struck him, and he turned  back to Yellow. "Just how far does this network stretch, anyway?"

He caught a fleeting glimpse--the swell of a Balmera song, joined by many voices, the ring of laughter and echoing footsteps in the castle's halls. Yellow preened, tired though she was. _**As far as there are people to support you. For now the core of the bond are these five--your parents and Eli--but many others sit on the periphery. They won't give or take enough to notice what is happening, but it adds up.**_

 _It adds up._ Hunk gave a giddy little laugh as the half-caught glimpses of the adjunct network faded from his mind.

This was going to take some getting used to.

* * *

Keith, once more, was hiding. Not with Red, not on the training deck, not even in his room. Keena would know to look for him in any of those places, and frankly, the only thing he wanted right now was to avoid Keena and her stupid, fake smiles and her stupid, fake concern, and the needling comments that always stayed _just_  this side of open criticism. He wasn't sure when she planned to leave, _if_  she planned to leave, but if he could put off another face-to-face meeting long enough, then maybe they could just... go their separate ways in peace.

It was sort of ironic, really, that his hiding place ended up being the cozy little study room Thace had claimed for his latest project. He'd tried to explain it to Keith, but a lot of the minutiae were lost to Keith's frenetic, cyclical thoughts. Thace was looking over some recent reports from one ally or another, comparing it to what he'd learned during his time as a spy to see if he might recognize any patterns the others on the castle-ship didn't.

...Well, Keena stood a good chance of recognizing those same patterns, but Keith didn't think he was imagining things when he scented a certain amount of distrust for Keena among Coran's crew.

He hoped that wasn't his fault.

Thace hadn't been at all surprised to see Keith on his doorstep first thing this morning, or if he had, he'd masked it flawlessly. He just offered Keith his choice of the room's small circle of upholstered chairs and turned up the music he had playing in the background--something soft and melodic and not at all Galran. (Maybe Galran? Not _Imperial_ , but if Keith had heard any music on the homeworld, he hadn't paid it enough mind to remember it now.)

And that was it. Thace continued on with his work, Keith occupied himself with a game Pidge had uploaded onto his comms unit, and they passed the hours in relative silence except once, when Thace asked Keith what he wanted for lunch. They even ate here, and Keith was so relieved he didn't have to ask Thace not to make him leave that he would have eaten Coran's cooking.

He knew, he _knew_ , that if he wanted to avoid Keena, hanging out with his uncle wasn't the smartest choice. Keena and Thace weren't exactly on the best of terms, but they'd worked together before, and Keena probably expected them to work together again. Sooner or later she was going to turn up here, and there was only so much Keith could do to avoid attention once she did.

But Thace wouldn't let her guilt him, or hound him with not-really-demands to fall in line with her master plan. Thace had promised Keith once before that he would never choose the mission over Keith again, and he hadn't broken that promise yet.

So Keith stayed, and Thace worked, and half the day slipped by without event. It lulled Keith into a false sense of security, and he was dozing in an armchair when a knock split the silence.

He startled awake at once, heart pounding in his chest as he frantically searched for somewhere to hide, though he'd already taken stock of his options and reached the unfortunate conclusion that unless he wanted to curl up behind his chair, there really wasn't anywhere to go.

Thace was at the door before their visitor could knock again, angling his body to obscure their view of Keith's side of the room. Frozen in his seat, Keith held his breath and strained to hear the sound of Keena's cloying voice.

Instead, Thace blinked, stiffening for a moment before the harsh line of his shoulders relaxed. "Karen. What brings you out this way?"

"I'm looking for Keith, actually. The other paladins haven't seen him, so I was wondering if you happened to know where he might be."

Thace's ear swiveled in Keith's direction like he was waiting for Keith to say something. (To say _what?_  That it was okay to let Karen in? _Was_ that okay? Keith wasn't in much of a chatty mood, but she wasn't _Keena_...)

After a beat of silence--not long enough for Karen to get suspicious, not even really enough time for Keith to have said anything, even if he'd been so inclined--Thace shook his head. "I've been here all day, I'm afraid." (Not a lie, technically. Not an answer to Karen's question, either, though.) "Did you want me to pass a message along if I happen to see him before you do?" (Also not a lie; he just knew perfectly well that he _would_  see Keith first.)

"No, that's all right," Karen said. "I just wanted to check on him. See how he's feeling after that whole nightmare with the Vkullor."

Maybe it was that Karen's simple statement contained more genuine concern for Keith's well-being than the entire conversation he'd had with Keena the night before. Maybe it was that, for a fleeting moment, he remembered the way she'd been there to greet him when he came out of the cryopod. (She'd greeted _him_ , with Matt five feet away. Keith didn't know what to do with that, but it stirred up something restless and slippery in his chest, and he couldn't help feeling that he owed her more of a thanks than the stunned silence she'd gotten from him that day before he took the first chance to escape from her watchful eye.)

Whatever the case, the sound of Karen's retreating footsteps finally broke him out of his shocked stupor, and he slid off the chair and darted past Thace before she could make it too far.

"Wait."

Karen turned, blinking at him, and then at Thace, the barest hint of reproach in her gaze.

"Keith?" Thace asked behind him, low enough that Karen might not have heard.

Keith turned, staring at the buttons on Thace's jacket. "It's fine. Just... give me a minute."

He made no move to stop Keith, who wrapped his arms around his middle as he slunk over to Karen's side, his eyes down so he didn't have to see that disappointed look again.

"Sorry," he muttered. "We thought you might be--" He stopped himself from saying _Keena,_ because he'd heard the other paladins talk about their parents, and none of them ever used their names--not even Hunk, who had the ready excuse of having two mothers who might therefore get confused if he always called them _mom._  (Lana was _Mom_ , and Akani was _Mama_ , and no one ever got confused, which only reinforced Keith's assessment that this was the sort of thing that just Wasn't Done.) "--my mother," he finished lamely, because even when he was following someone else's script, he couldn't quite bring himself to call Keena _Mom._

Karen's hand reached out toward him, but she stopped herself partway and instead crossed her arms, tucking her hands under her armpits like she needed something to hold them back. Keith risked a look at her face, but the soft smile she wore was too much, too kind, too familiar, and he didn't know what to do with that, either, so he dropped his gaze again.

"So..." she said, apparently deciding not to comment on the way he'd stumbled over the mention of Keena. He was grateful, and he tried not to let his ears quiver too much with embarrassment. "How are you feeling?"

Keith's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's only been a few days since you came out of the cryopod. Are you doing okay?"

He shrugged, biting down on an irrational irritation at her for asking that question. Of course he was okay; he hadn't really been _hurt_  in the first place, and even if he had been, the cryopod would have taken care of it. But he didn't want to fight with Matt's mom, so he just shrugged and stared at the wall. "Fine."

"That's good to hear." She paused, and Keith struggled not to fidget. Was that all she'd come here for? Or was she waiting for him to say something? If she was, she was going to be waiting a long time, because he had no idea what she wanted from him.

She shifted, looking past him to Thace's study. He'd retreated back inside, back to his chair and his tablet full of files, but the door was still open. That was how Keith knew he was still listening. If Keith needed rescuing, Thace would intervene.

(Unfortunately, Thace didn't seem to think awkwardness warranted a rescue.)

At length, Karen sighed. "How are you doing, though? Really? I know Keena can be..." There was an unspoken insult hanging in the air, suspended in the silence Karen refused to fill with something nicer than whatever it was she really wanted to say. "She hasn't been giving you as hard a time as she's been giving me, I hope."

"I'm fine," he said, though it felt like a lie. Keena _hadn't_ given him a hard time, not really. Yes, everything she said had an undercurrent of judgment to it, like she wanted so badly to correct you but didn't want to step on any toes. Yes, just seeing her from across the room made Keith's stomach turn over in an uncontrollable bout of anxiety. But what had she _actually_  done to him since getting here? Wait until after the politics to say hello? Tell him he was capable of amazing things? Take away the subtext that very well may have been all in his head, take away his discomfort, which very much _was_  all in his head, and what, objectively, had Keena done wrong?

He hated that he let her do this to him. Hated that he did this to himself. So what if he didn't like the last mission she'd given him? She hadn't given him a new one, and if she did, and he didn't like it, all he had to do was say no. She wasn't his commanding officer.

She was just his _mother_ , and somehow despite everything, he still wanted to make her proud.

Karen was frowning now, one hand sneaking out from beneath the arm pinning it to her side. She curled it in front of her chest, still holding back, and Keith hated her restraint as much as he was grateful for it. The electric storm beneath his skin was already too much to bear; a touch, _any_  touch, would have knocked his feet right out from under him.

(He wanted it anyway.)

"Well..." She paused, huffed. Keith didn't think she'd believed his lie, but she was too kind to call him out on it.  "Good. You tell me if she starts bothering you about anything, okay? That woman knows how to get underneath your skin, and she enjoys doing so far too much, if you ask me. You just... Don't listen to her too much, okay? I know she's your mother, but--" She paused again, and again an unspoken insult hung in the air. It occurred to Keith that Karen might be holding back on account of _him_ , like if she insulted Keena, he would take it personally. "Sometimes I don't think she appreciates how much _good_  you're doing out here."

The fervor in her voice closed around Keith's throat, holding his breath and his words hostage. He looked up at her, and her expression made his heart thud painfully in his chest. It was an expression he didn't have a name for, a pinch between her eyebrows, a darting in her eyes like she was trying to memorize every inch of him, a slight parting of her lips, and intake of breath as she started to say something else, only to stop herself. Her hand still hovered at the level of her throat, her thumb tracing the tips of each fingernail in turn.

"Mom?"

Keith jumped as Pidge's voice rang out down the hall. Karen turned, and the hand at her throat reached out for Pidge as they rounded the corner, their own hands clutching something close to their chest. Keith hadn't seen them since... he honestly wasn't sure _when_  he'd last seen them. Not for a week, if not longer. They looked like a shadow of themself as Karen hovered over them, pulling them close and whispering her concern.

Keith's heart gave a painful lurch in his chest, and he took a self-conscious step back as Pidge glanced his way. He caught a glimpse of the thing they held--a silvery oblong barely small enough for their hands to conceal. The way they held it, it was something precious, something _private_ , and Keith's presence here was an intrusion.

Their eyes locked, and Keith immediately looked away, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "I'll... just be going then."

No one spoke to stop him, and he took two steps back before turning his back on the Holts, on Pidge huddled against Karen, downcast and restless; on Karen, forming herself into a living shield to defend them from the world.

Keith's heart fluttered, his breath coming shallow and unsteady as he raced back into Thace's study and shut the door behind him. Thace's eyes burned a hole in the side of his head, but they were nothing compared to Karen's gaze, whose weight he felt even through a solid inch of metal.


	8. Testing a Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Ryner left Pidge two things when she died: her Legacy seed, now planted on Olkarion in the Memorial Grove; and a similarly-sized metal seed that Pidge has so far not figured out the purpose of. Pidge has been studying it, desperate to find out what it is and what it's for. Meanwhile, Val has taken over flying the Green Lion in their stead. She had a rough time of it when the team formed Voltron to fight the Vkullor, but is determined to make it work.
> 
> Meanwhile, Meri is struggling with guilt in the aftermath of her time as a spy in Haggar's inner circle, Rowan introduced himself to Coran, and Sam and Rolo learned more about the creatures used to make Zarkon's Dark Lions.

_In case the worst happens._ Karen read the words for the fourth time, her mind spinning circles, searching for something to latch onto.

"You said this was Ryner's?"

Pidge pulled one foot up on the couch, hooking an arm around their knee. "Yeah. She hid it in the same compartment in Green's cockpit where her Legacy seed was." They paused, looking everywhere except at Karen. "Do you have any idea what it is?"

She didn't, but she knew better than to admit it so easily. The fact that Pidge had come to her with this at all--and she could tell they'd been working themself up to it for days--meant that this was important. Beyond important. So instead, she turned the thing, the seed, or whatever it was, over in her hand, and she considered what little she _did_  know.

"Ryner never mentioned it--not to me, and not even to Green, if I'm not mistaken. She didn't want us finding out about it too soon." (A bit of a leap in logic? Perhaps, but this thing was such an enigma Karen could only assume Ryner had deliberately concealed its existence. She must have had a reason.)

Pidge groaned, their forehead dropping onto their knee. "They why leave it for me? It has to be important, right? A new weapon, or some new way to steal information from the Empire?"

Karen shook her head before she could think better of it. "Nothing so direct as that."

"Then _what?_  Is there something _inside_? How do we open it?"

"I don't think it _does_  open."

"Then what the fuck is it _for_?"

Karen's shoulders slumped, and she passed the strange metal seed back to Pidge. "I wish I could tell you that, sweetheart. Really I do. But... I just don't know."

Pidge sighed, slumping in their seat, and Karen reached out to comfort them, but they rolled away from her touch and pushed themself to their feet, the seed disappearing into the pocket of their hoodie. "Okay. Thanks anyway, I guess."

Karen sat on the edge of the couch, staring after them. "Pidge... It's getting late. Do you want to go get some dinner?"

"Not hungry," they said. "I'm kinda tired, actually, so I think I'll just go to bed a little early."

Their words stank of a lie. They weren't tired; they just didn't want to be around people-- _still._  Karen didn't need to be an adjunct to know that. It wasn't healthy, isolating themself like this, and sooner or later Karen was going to have to push them to accept the help everyone knew they needed--but not yet. So she let them go, and tucked the strange metal seed into the back of her mind in the hopes that something would come to her sooner or later.

* * *

Val sat in the Green Lion's cockpit, forcing herself to relax a little more with each deliberate breath. In through her nose, nice and slow. Out through her mouth. Controlled. Calm.

It was getting easier to be inside Green. Her pain was slowly healing, so even though Val could tell she was still trying to shield Val from the worst of it, it didn't feel so much like there was a brick wall between her and the lion. ...More like a heavy curtain, or maybe the hum of a crowded room.

They'd formed Voltron together, though. Val counted that as a victory. True, the pain of losing Ryner was easier to bear when spread across all five lions with all their pilots, but it had still been there, and Val had felt closer to Green than ever... She just... had to have a little bit of support from Meri, and from Blue herself, to find her footing.

 _Come on, girl,_  Val thought, breathing again and reaching out to the voice like rustling leaves that tickled her ears. _Work with me._ She knew it was hard--for _both_ of them. Green wasn't Blue, but Val wasn't Ryner, either. They both had to relearn things that should have been second nature to them, and it was frustrating to reach for a bond only to find it wasn't where you expected it to be. But that was all the more reason to practice _now_ , to get it right.

Val didn't like fumbling her way through these things when they suddenly became a matter of life and death.

The wind came again, carrying the rustle of leaves and the song of alien birds, and Val strained to hear the words carried in those dream-like sounds. It had been hard to understand Blue at first, too, her voice more emotion than words until Val learned to speak her language.

She screwed her eyes shut, reaching, and for a moment everything became so much more vivid. The crisp, sweet sent of pine sap conjured forests Val had only seen on family vacations; fresh, warm dirt reminded her of the summer heat in her mother's garden in the back yard. Dappled sunlight warmed her skin, and bird calls raised goosebumps on her arms. She was in the forest, in the jungle, in a garden, in a greenhouse. It was hot and cold, wet and dry. It was safe; it was dangerous. It was familiar, and foreign.

But it was the soft-sweet scent of roses and the aroma of fresh-turned dirt that hit her through the haze of missed connections. It was the scent of mourning, and of remembrance.

"Oh," Val breathed. "You really don't talk like Blue, do you?"

The smell of crushed stems, of green branches broken underfoot. Val hadn't realized there _was_  such a scent, but the image it brought to mind was so vivid there was no mistaking it. And the apology that underlay it was just as clear.

Val's heart twinged. "No, Green, that's not--" She paused to breathe, focusing on her emotions. She needed to stay calm. Needed not to fuel the emotional fire that was always smoldering in the underbrush of their bond.

(And now she was doing it, too, with the nature imagery.)

"That wasn't an accusation," Val said. "I just meant, it makes sense now why I was having so much trouble understanding you. I was expecting you and Blue to talk to me the same way. Now that I know that's not true, maybe we can get somewhere."

Green purred--that much, at least, was the same, then. It was oddly settling, and Val forced herself to relax  once more into her chair. She'd come to Green's cockpit to deepen her understanding of the lion. She didn't have anything in particular to say, so she just listened, eyes closed, soaking in the slowly shifting scents Green presented to her. It was a little bit like listening to a song in a foreign language--pretty, and moving, and occasionally skimming close to something she could understand, but ultimately unintelligible.

Still she listened. Breathed. Drifted...

She landed abruptly in cold water that shocked her out of her trance, freezing her breath in her lungs. She gasped, thrashing against the water. It wasn't very deep, but she choked on it just the same, disoriented and unhappy at the rude interruption.

She finally found solid ground, and more importantly, _dry_  ground, and spluttered as she crawled up out of the water. The distant, rumbling amusement that sounded suspiciously like Blue cued her into what had happened even before she recognized the alien trees overhanging this river.

"The Heart?" she asked, climbing to her feet. It _was_  the Heart; she'd been here often enough to know that beyond any doubt, but what she didn't understand was _how._  She hadn't been in Blue.

A bird cried directly overhead, shrill and piercing. Val jumped, spinning toward the sound in the instant before she recognized it for what it was. Finding nothing but shaded jungle and the occasional flicker of some small creature, she breathed out a self-conscious laugh. _Jumping at shadows,_  she scolded herself. _Very paladinesque._

Then it hit her, and she almost laughed again. A _jungle._  Was she really that dense? Okay, so she'd always assumed the Heart of each Lion was it's own thing, but she knew better now. She'd seen for herself that their Hearts were all interconnected.

Of _course_  the jungle was Green's. Val had been coming here all along, to the border between Blue and Green, and she'd never even known it.

She almost traveled to the island with the tower, just on instinct, but then she thought better of it. She was here for Green, after all, not Blue. So she turned and strode deeper into the jungle. It was a bizarre experience, all around. The Heart almost seemed to be drawing on her memories, filling in trees and ferns and flowers from Earth. There were alien plants, too--a lot of things that looked like they might have come from Olkarion, which would make sense if Green's paladins helped to shape her Heart.

But it just gave the whole place a strangely surreal feeling. And _un_ real feeling. Val thought maybe the Earth plants were supposed to make her feel more at home, but all it did was make it all feel like an illusion.

Still, she steeled her nerves and continued on, craning her neck every time a flamboyant bird fluttered by in the canopy or a creature too small and quick to see darted through her peripheral vision. Funny, she'd been to Blue's Heart so many times that nothing felt like a threat anymore. Not getting caught in a storm in the middle of the ocean, not falling off the cliff on the island. Not even whatever astral creatures might live beneath the waves.

 _Here,_  it was totally different. It didn't feel _dangerous_ , exactly. It was just unknown, and Val didn't like that she couldn't tell what was normal and what wasn't.

The deeper she ventured, the fainter the burble of the river became. Blue's voice faded with it--never gone entirely, but less prevalent. Like she was here--she was everywhere--but she shared the space with the other lions, and here in the depths of the jungle, away from the water, Green took center stage.

Val's steps slowed, her heart leaping into her throat.

They _shared_  the space.

They _coexisted._

All the lions were linked, inexorably, inherently. _Val_  wasn't connected to all of them, but they were connected to each other.

There was a realization there, half-glimpsed, something she couldn't put into words, but she followed it, rushing toward the inevitable end. It felt important, and it felt dangerous. She didn't know how far she could push it, or how far she could trust it.

...Was it possible...?

Was she crazy?

Or... if she could bilocate with Lance and Nyma because of their mutual bonds with Blue...

Was her bond with Green enough for her to bilocate with Pidge, too?

She quashed the thought as soon as it had formed, refusing to let herself hope. To let her imagination run away with her. Pidge couldn't handle the disappointment if Val turned out to be wrong about this.

But it was something worth looking into, wasn't it?

(Assuming, of course, that Sam Holt was still in there for them to find. Assuming Haggar hadn't ripped him out and filled the hole with her own twisted magic.)

Val stopped, and breathed, and drank in the multilayered scents of the jungle.

Find Green.

She could consider the possibility of bilocating with Pidge later.

* * *

Edi leaped back, deflecting the gladiator's staff with a wild swing of her own. The impact rang up her arms and into her shoulders, shivering there like the memory of another battle.

(Amazing how terrifying these things were after she'd seen them slaughter innocent people.)

She spun, putting space between herself and the gladiator, and forced herself to breathe. It wasn't going to do her or _anyone_  any good to stay hung up on things that had happened. Keturah was gone. The castle was free from her influence. The gladiators weren't going to go berserk anymore--and they were still the best way she had to get better at fighting. Wasn't like Allura could always be here to help Edi out.

The gladiator approached again, but this time Edi was ready for it, deflecting its every attack and spinning beneath its staff to deliver a sharp jab to its midsection. It flew back, tripping over its own feet, and Edi followed up with a blow to the head that ended the match.

She stepped back, flicking her ears and panting, open-mouthed, as she shook out her arms and legs. She watched the gladiator twitch on the ground until the training deck opened a hole to swallow it up. (Just... assessing her performance. She didn't _actually_  expect the robot to pick itself up and attack while her back was turned.)

Once the hole closed up again, she finally turned to go in search of water, and she jumped clean out of her skin at the sight of Luz standing at the edge of the room, eerily silent and wide-eyed as she tracked Edi's every movement.

"Luz!" Edi said, clutching her staff to her chest and making a concerted effort not to let her ears lay flat, no matter _how much_  they wanted to. "I didn't hear you come in."

Luz dropped her gaze to the floor, tucking her hands behind her backside as she slumped against the wall. She rose up on her toes, then dropped back down, and her shoulders jumped in a shrug that didn't look as casual as Edi thought it was supposed to. "Yeah... Didn't want to mess you up." She paused, cocking her head to the side. "Does Allura know you're down here?"

Edi bristled, indignation chasing away the (not fear, _definitely_  not fear) residual adrenaline that had made her hackles rise. "Of course she does." She pursed her lips as Luz continued to stare at her. "Maybe not _right this second_. But she knows I wanted to keep training, and so she gave me permission to fight the gladiator up to level three on my own."

"What if you get hurt?" Luz asked. She asked this with the same light inflection she'd asked the last question, and Edi belatedly realized that she wasn't trying to get Edi in trouble, like Maka would have been.

She was just curious.

Relaxing a little, Edi plucked at the fabric of her training uniform--the same cool black fabric that the paladins wore under their armor, with some light padding around her chest area. "Castle's tracking my progress," she explained. "If I take a hit above a certain threshold, or if I go down and don't get back up quick enough, or if they notice anything unusual about my heart rate or breathing, the system shuts down, and Princess Allura and Coran'll both get an alert."

It was an utterly reasonable precaution, and Edi couldn't help being sore about it. She'd faced off against the gladiator on her own just fine before, and she hadn't needed the castle to babysit her. (But, well, she couldn't admit that to the Princess, when those fights definitely _hadn't_  been okayed.)

"Huh." Luz rose up on her toes again, and again dropped back down, her braids swaying around her shoulders. "You train a lot?"

Edi shrugged, suddenly bashful. "I guess." More than any of the _other_  kids did, that was for sure. More than a lot of the adults who didn't have their training mandated on account of being in the Guard or an actual paladin. "I want to be a paladin when I'm older, so I have to be ready."

Luz's brow wrinkled at that for some reason, and she began to chew on her thumbnail.

"So," Edi said, frowning to match Luz. "What are you doing here? I've never seen you training with the Princess before."

"I know." Luz spoke around a particularly tough piece of thumbnail that was resisting the pull of her teeth. It finally let go, and she turned her head to spit it out. "I guess I always figured Lance would do all the fighting for me."

Edi bit her tongue to keep from saying what she wanted to--that you couldn't count on someone always being there to save you, even if that someone was your brother. She didn't _need_  to say it; Luz already knew. The castle getting captured had turned a lot of things on their head.

"So..."

Luz's eyes darted up and landed on Edi's staff. She looked up at Edi, flushed red, and looked back down at her toes. "Teach me to fight?"

"Sorry?"

Luz screwed her eyes shut and bit down on another bit of thumbnail, but she didn't repeat her question, leaving Edi to gape at her. It wasn't strange that she wanted to learn to protect herself, after the way things had gone with Keturah, but...

"You want _me_  to teach you?"

"Yeah?" Luz's voice was small, unsure, and she scuffed the toe of her boot across the floor. "I can't ask Allura. I'm no good at this, and I'd just embarrass myself. And Lance would freak out if I even brought it up with him. But... you can fight. So I thought, maybe... I dunno..."

Edi was practically buzzing out of her fur, her ears flicking this way and that worse than if she'd had a bug trying to land inside them. Yeah, she could fight. That didn't mean she knew how to teach someone else.

But it wasn't like she could make Luz any _worse._

(It was a mean thing to think, Edi knew, but it was _true._  Luz hadn't had any training, and humans were squishy, and if Edi said no, then what would Luz do? If she tried to figure it out for herself, she was just as likely to get herself hurt, and hurt bad, as actually figure out anything useful. Even worse, she might go to _Maka_  for help, and then she really was doomed.)

"Okay," Edi said, trying to sound as confident as Allura would have. "I mean, I've never done this before, so I might not explain things the best, but if you really want to learn, I can try."

Luz bounded away from the wall at once, springing out into the center of the training area like she'd worked antigav boosters into her weird, clunky shoes somehow. Edi took a step backward, afraid she might get an elbow to the gut if she stayed where she was. Luz seemed not to notice the slip and bounced on her toes, her fists opening and closing at her side.

"Okay," she said, all high strung and too-bright like she was about to jump off a cliff and didn't want to let on she was scared. "What's first?"

"First," Edi said, swinging her staff around so she could use the end to tap Luz's ankles, "is stance. Your feet need to be farther apart. One a little ahead of the other. If you don't stand right, you'll never be able to move right, and the fight's over before you ever get a chance to attack."

Luz wrinkled her nose. "Seriously? You're going to teach me how to _stand?_ "

"I'm going to teach you how to not fall over when I push you."

"Wait, what?"

Edi turned, giving Luz one solid shove on the shoulder. She'd stopped bouncing, but she was still up on her toes a little bit, and she rocked backward with the shove, losing whatever balance she may have had to begin with. She flailed her arms, a tiny, startled _eep_  slipping out of her.

Edi grabbed her wrist to catch her before she hit the ground, leaving Luz staring up at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Edi struggled not to smile.

"Still think you don't need to learn how to stand?"

Luz let herself be pulled up, brushing herself off. "That's not fair," she said, pouting just a little. "I wasn't ready."

"Okay, then. Get ready." Edi crossed her arms, watching as Luz straightened, hesitated, then spread her feet--too far. "Ready?"

Luz nodded, and Edi gave her another shove, just a little harder than the last. She wobbled again, and this time even though Edi tried to catch her, her arms were swinging just a little too wide. She landed hard, her breath rushing out of her with an _oof_ , and she was downright _glaring_  as she accepted Edi's outstretched hand.

"You're not a particle barrier, you know," Edi said, and only faltered when she saw the look of bewilderment on Luz's face. "It means you don't have to stop the push. You just need to make it _not_  push you over. Push me."

It was a good thing Edi had practiced maintaining a ready stance wherever she was, because Luz didn't even hesitate. She seized her chance for vengeance in both hands, barreling into Edi with a shove so hard Luz almost bowled _herself_  over. Edi absorbed the force of it, stepping back. She didn't let Luz knock her off balance; she moved _with_  the shove, stayed in control of it.

"See?" Edi said, proud of herself for not sounding even a little bit surprised by Luz's attack. "If you know how to stand, you know how to move. If you know how to move, _you'll_  be in control when an attack forces you to move. That's the important thing, control."

Luz still didn't look convinced, but she kept her mouth shut and let Edi show her where to put her feet, how to bend her knees, how to center her weight.

The most surprising thing was how nice it was to have someone listen to her for once.

* * *

Akira was acting... odd.

He had been, Allura thought, for longer than she'd noticed it. He hovered, always on the edge of the room, never stepping into the spotlight. He hovered around Shiro, yes, and he hovered around Keith and Matt. But more and more, he seemed to be hovering over Meri.

Even more strange was when he pulled Allura aside after a call with the Coalition to discuss targets for their next big push. (Voltron needed to go back on the offensive soon. There were always more distress calls to handle, certainly, but if they kept just responding to what Zarkon did, they'd never get anywhere in this war.)

"Hey," Akira said, falling into step beside her.

Allura eyed him. He'd attended the meeting, too, offering his perspective as Guard Commander and weighing in on how much the paladins could realistically entrust to less robust forces. "Hello...?"

Akira shoved his hands in his pockets, a sharp change from the gravity with which he'd carried himself during the call. "I'll bet you're glad that's over."

"The call?" Allura asked. "Or the thinking about the war? Because I have to tell you, I never really stop thinking about the war."

"Never?" Akira shook his head, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Good god, it's worse than I thought."

Allura took offense at that, and she stopped walking, noticing for the first time that Akira had steered her away from the elevator that the others had headed for. They were alone in this corridor, curving away from the bridge towards one of the main conference rooms. "Excuse me?"

Akira waved off her concern. (Steamrolled over it, more like.) "Nothing. Hey. You got any plans for the night?"

Arching an eyebrow at him, Allura considered her response. Part of her wanted to make something up, just to be difficult, but the truth was, she was probably just going to end up fretting over the mountains of unanswered distress calls again. "Not... particularly, no. Why?"

"Asking for a friend. Meet in the rec room in an hour?"

"That depends. What are we doing?"

Akira just shushed her--actually _shushed_  her, pressing a finger to her lips. "It's a surprise. But a good one. I promise."

"I'm not sure I believe you."

Akira grinned, backing away from her with a rollicking gait. "Ah, see? That's Takashi's influence. Don't mind that. I give him a hard time cause he's my brother. You don't have to worry about that."

That still didn't tell her anything about what surprise he had planned for her, but he was still backing away, his eyebrows up and his head tilted awaiting her answer. With a sigh, she waved her acquiescence, and Akira's smile widened.

"Perfect," he said. "See you then."

But when Allura showed up to the rec room at the appointed time, Akira wasn’t there. Instead, she found Rover, the Imperial drone Pidge had stolen (rescued, according to them) so long ago. There was a sticky note stuck to the front of the little bot, with the words FOLLOW ME written in big, blocky letters.

Rover chirped, circling Allura twice before zipping out into the hallway. She stared after it, debating whether or not she was going to regret taking Akira up on his little game. Curiosity eventually won out, and she followed Rover down the hall, up some stairs, out across the bridge to Blue Tower, and up several more flights of stairs before it finally stopped in front of an unmarked door in the middle of an empty hallway.

Allura frowned at Rover for another moment, but it seemed to consider its task done, and it bobbed nearby, utterly unconcerned with Allura’s dilemma.

She’d come this far, though. No reason to turn back now. With a sigh, she hit the door controls and stepped into the dusty, dimly-lit room beyond. It was a bedroom, and it wasn’t as empty as Allura had assumed.

"Allura," Meri said, rocking back even as her feet dropped from the edge of the mattress to the floor, like she wanted to stand and she wanted to retreat, all in one motion. "What are you doing here?"

And, _oh_ , Allura suddenly saw Akira's game. He _had_  been hovering. He'd been worried about Meri. Allura didn't know how he knew where she would be, but he'd decided Meri needed Allura, whether she would admit it or not, and he'd taken it up on himself to make that happen.

Allura said nothing as she crossed to the bed and sat beside Meri, clasping her hands in her lap. She didn't try to look at the tablet in Meri's hands, now clutched to her chest like she was guarding a precious secret. Instead, she looked around the room--a small single room, no different from the thousands of similar rooms scattered across the castle. It was about the same size as the rooms the paladins had taken as their quarters, with about as many furnishings--a bed, a desk, a nightstand. A closet with a small selection of standard clothing and a bathroom stocked with the bare necessities.

This room appeared to be unoccupied--but of course it would be. If Meri wanted to be alone, she would have gone to a residential floor that hadn't yet seen any new residents. Less chance of passing someone in the halls that way.

"What are you doing all the way out here?" Allura asked, leaning her hands on the mattress and tilting her head back to stare at the ceiling. She tried to keep her voice light. She knew she had a tendency to turn any question into an interrogation, and she knew Meri right now was particularly sensitive to things like that. 

Meri drummed her fingers on the back of her tablet, one shoulder twitching into a shrug. "Feeling nostalgic, I guess?"

That answer wasn't at all what Allura had expected, and she turned to look at Meri, a frown digging furrows between her brows. "Nostalgic?"

Meri looked over, brushing her hair out of her eyes and tucking it behind her ear. "This was my old room. Remember? When I first came to the castle, I was assigned civilian quarters. It was almost a decaphebe before I was formally accepted into the apprenticeship program."

"I'd forgotten about that."

"Well, we didn't see much of each other until I started spending all that time with your mom. I mean--I knew who _you_  were. You were the princess, for gods' sake. I was already crushing on you. But I was just another nobody." She paused, her mouth pulling into a lopsided smile. "It's probably for the best. I would've just made an idiot of myself if I'd tried to talk to you."

Allura couldn't help herself; she laughed. "You? Please. Since when have you ever been shy?"

Meri gave her a shove, a smile fighting its way out. "Since I started crushing on a _princess_. Just because your mom ruined any misconceptions I may have had about royals being halfway respectable--"

"I'm _very_ respectable, thank you."

Meri only raised an eyebrow. "One word. Teracross."

Allura flushed, pursing her lips in a vain attempt to make her reaction look like anger, rather than embarrassment. "And whose fault was that?"

"Mine," Meri said, flashing a devious smile. "But you're the one who followed my lead without a second thought."

"You're the worst."

"You know you love me."

Allura looked at her--tired, worn, but smiling a genuine smile--and she couldn't stop her own soft smile. "Yes," she said. "I do."

It was Meri's turn to flush, her ears trembling for the briefest of moments before she ducked her head, hugging her tablet to her chest. Allura gave her a moment to collect herself, then scooted closer and rested a hand on Meri's knee.

"So... what _were_  you doing out here?"

Meri shrugged. "I told you. I was feeling nostalgic. Started wandering, found my old room..." She trailed off, then slowly relaxed her death grip on her tablet, tilting it for Allura to see. "Then decided to go digging in the archives to see what pictures might have survived."

Allura was left winded, like she'd just been punched in the gut, and she reached out for the tablet in a daze. She'd had her own album at one point, a private collection of her favorite images and recordings of family and friends. It had gotten lost somewhere in the chaos of the early war--left behind in one room or another, or picked up by one of the castle's other residents, or maybe the castle's systems had re-shelved it in the wrong place during the ten thousand years it spent on Arus.

The truth was, from the moment Allura emerged from stasis, she'd been too consumed with the concerns of the war to think about mementos of the past, and by the time she slowed down enough to miss it, she hadn't the faintest idea where to look.

Or maybe she'd just been afraid to go looking--through the empty rooms or through the archives full of snapshots of a dead world.

"Did you...?" Allura snatched her hand back, her eyes flicking to Meri, briefly, before returning to the tablet and sticking there. She breathed in, steeled herself, and tried again. "What did you find?"

"A lot." Meri sounded shaken, her lip wobbling. "A lot of people uploaded their holos to the archives, and it doesn't look like Keturah cared enough to go digging through. I don't even recognize half of what's in here." She paused, swallowed. "Lealle always was a social butterfly."

"Most of the paladins were," Allura said, blinking to clear the tears that had already begun to form. She opened her mouth to say more, to reason her way through it like she hadn't known the people in the images on that tablet, like she didn't care whether or not any recordings of them had survived. She couldn't make herself do it. So she just leaned into Meri, and whispered, "Show me?"

Meri settled the tablet in her lap so the holos could form in the air above it. She wrapped an arm around Allura's shoulders, tentative, and Allura reached up to catch Meri's hand in her own, squeezing once in reassurance.

It was all the comfort she could manage as she watched the past play out in miniature before her.

* * *

"You know, you're allowed to take a break every now and again."

Shiro turned at the sound of Lance's voice, hooking his arm over the back of his chair to get a better view of the door. The bridge was quiet, Coran's crew keeping to themselves at the forward stations and leaving Shiro to work in peace behind them. Their conversation tapered off at Lance's intrusion, however, and the back of Shiro's head itched as he imagined them turning to stare at him.

"I'm aware," Shiro said, amusement giving his words a wry twist. "I'll have you know I've only been up here for an hour."

"Have you now?" Lance asked, sauntering over with his hands behind his back. "And what were you doing before that?"

Shiro snorted and returned his gaze to his screen. "I appreciate the concern, Lance, but I promise I'm getting better about overworking myself." As much as the war allowed, at any rate. "I'm almost done for the day, but Hunk and Shay are expecting the delegation from the free Migration soon. Akira needed Allura for something, so I promised I'd hang out long enough to greet them. All I'm doing is getting a jump start on tomorrow while I'm waiting."

From the corner of his eye, he saw Lance cross his arms. He didn't say anything, but he didn't have to; he clearly didn't trust Shiro to actually step away once the delegation arrived.

...He wasn't wrong to worry.

"Can I at least help you out?" Lance asked. "Keep you company? Chip away at the list of things waiting for your attention?"

Shiro hesitated only a moment before pulling up a folder and swiping it toward the edge of his screen. It disappeared in a shower of holographic particles as it passed beyond the projector's range, and the screen at the blue paladin station flickered to life to receive it. With a grin, Lance clapped Shiro on the shoulder and went to the other station, nodding along as Shiro brought him up to speed.

It was getting easier to let go of things. (He should _hope_  it was, after weeks of nonstop prodding from all sides. If it wasn't Black and Allura urging him to open up, it was Lance blustering in and sweet talking Shiro into sharing his workload, or it was Akira outright bullying him into taking a break.) To be fair, in this case it was mostly busy work--it was late, and he was tired, and even _he_  knew better than to try to tackle anything like battle plans or diplomatic tangles tonight. 

"How's it going down there, anyway?" Lance asked after a time. "I've barely talked to Hunk since the attack."

Shiro paused, his eyes tracing the same line of text three times before he gave up on deciphering it. "Metos is healing. Last I heard, they're clearing out the last of the collapsed tunnels, so the heavy lifting should be done soon. After that..."

Lance blew out a long breath. "Yeah. You don't just bounce back from an attack like that. At least Atsiphos is doing better, though, right?"

"That's true. She was declared officially parasite-free earlier today."

"See!" Lance flung a hand out. "It's not _all_  bad news."

"It's not," Shiro agreed. "And not to jinx it or anything, but Shay seems hopeful about the delegation that's coming. They haven't given a formal answer, but I would be very surprised if they didn't offer some sort of aid."

"Think they'll welcome Theros and the others into the Migration?" Lance asked, his voice hushed like he was afraid if he spoke too loud, someone would hear, and the invitation would be revoked.

"I hope so. Zarkon's not going to give up on reclaiming them just because we foiled this first attack."

Lance was silent for a long moment, and there was an undercurrent of judgment to that silence. "Reclaiming them? He sent a freaking Vkullor after them."

Shiro tipped his head to the side, but otherwise gave no answer. He'd spent the last two weeks trying to tell himself that if Zarkon had really wanted to destroy the Balmera as some sort of retribution for throwing off his rule, then the Vkullor would have shattered them before the paladins ever had a chance to intervene.

But part of him couldn't help but agree with Lance. This wasn't about retaking the territory he'd lost to the Voltron Coalition. This was about payback, plain and simple.

Thankfully, Lance let it drop, and they churned through the rest of the busy work in silence. The delegation still hadn't arrived, the bridge crew changed shifts, and Shiro was just beginning to contemplate digging into some of the heftier reports after all, when Lance swiped two fingers across his screen and sent an _eshet_  challenge zooming to Shiro's screen.

Shiro blinked at it, turned, and raised an eyebrow in Lance's direction.

Lance only smiled, resting his chin in his palm and watching Shiro through narrowed eyes. "Scared?"

Shiro could only laugh as he accepted Lance's challenge and started selecting his units for the first game.

There were worse ways to pass the time.

* * *

Luz didn't notice right away when Wyn joined her and Edi in the training room. He moved like a cat sometimes, quiet and small like he didn't want anyone to notice him, and Luz was too busy trying not to let Edi push her over to worry about whoever might have been creeping around the edges of the room.

So when Edi finally called a break, and Luz turned to go fight with the gizmo in the wall for some water--and instead found herself face-to-face with an Altean--she barely stopped herself from screaming out loud.

"Sorry," Wyn said, edging a half a step away around the edge of the room. "Didn't mean to scare you."

Luz crossed her arms, wrinkled her nose, and stalked past him to the control panel. "I'm not scared. You're just sneaky."

In the silence that followed, Luz imagined Edi and Wyn were trading looks behind her back, but she resisted the urge to turn and see if her instinct was right or not. Instead, she leaned in close to the controls, squinting at the Altean labels to try to figure out what did what. She'd seen Edi use this panel to open a compartment full of water pouches, but she didn't need to have spent lots of time on the training deck to know it was full of hidden traps and tricks, and she wasn't sure she wanted to find out what happened if she pushed the wrong button.

Edi let her flounder for just a moment before taking pity, reaching over Luz's shoulder to push a pinkish square button--not at all the one Luz would have picked, so it was probably a good thing Edi had done it for her. A hatch on the wall hissed and slid out just far enough for Luz to hook her fingers into the gap. She pulled it open like a drawer, grabbed a water pouch, and flopped down against the wall before stabbing the straw through the silvery seal.

"Come to train?" Edi asked Wyn, ignoring Luz altogether. Luz scowled at that, and took a long drink of water.

Wyn shrugged, his arms crossed over his chest and his fingers fiddling with his sleeves. "Maybe later."

That was a weird thing to say. Luz kept sipping her water, but she glanced from Edi to Wyn and back again, trying to figure out if she was missing something. Edi seemed just as confused, though, her whole posture changing. She'd been all squared up and tall, like she was ready to take Wyn on then and there, but now she'd hunched down some, her hands tucked in close to her chest. It was funny how she could look so tough and in charge one minute, like she was already a paladin and knew better than anyone in the room what to do, and the next she looked barely older than Luz herself, and no more sure of what to do.

"Okay..." Edi said. "Did you need something? There's not much interesting to watch if you just came for that. Luz just wanted me to teach her some stuff, so I'm..." She waved vaguely, and Luz popped her straw out of her mouth long enough to fill in the gaps.

"She's pushing me around, and I'm trying to figure out how to not fall on my butt."

Edi gave her a dirty look at that, which really wasn't fair, because it was the _truth_ , but Luz just smiled at her and stuck her straw back in her mouth, never mind her water pouch was basically empty by now.

"It's fine," Wyn said. "I was just sort of... wandering around. Just ignore me."

"Why are you acting so weird?" Luz asked, because it was obvious Edi wasn't going to ask, even though she was thinking the same thing.

To Luz's surprise, Wyn actually flinched at that, ducking his head and scratching his cheek. He was taller than Luz by quite a bit, so she usually couldn't see the scars that traced patterns through his hair, but she could see them now. She could see the bald spots where they were, at least, even if the scars themselves didn't stand out much against his dark skin.

"Luz," Edi said sharply. "Don't be rude. It's fine, Wyn. You can do whatever you want."

"No," Wyn said, his voice strained like he was fighting against his own words. "She's right. I... Can I tell you something? Promise you won't tell anyone else yet."

"A secret?" Luz tossed her empty water pouch aside and leaned forward, her hands wrapping around her crossed ankles. "What sort of secret?"

"We promise we won't tell anyone," Edi interjected, with another hard look at Luz.

Luz snorted. "You can't promise for me."

"No, but I can promise _you_  I won't teach you anything else if you break Wyn's trust."

That was just rude, and Luz stuck her tongue out at Edi just so she didn't go thinking she'd won. "I wasn't gonna _tattle_  on him, jeez."

Wyn gave a funny little smile, faint and shaky, like he thought he was supposed to find the banter funny but couldn't really focus on it. "Thanks," he said, then sat there with his mouth hanging open for long enough that Luz was about to tell him to spit it out. Edi spotted her intention too quick, though, and kicked her in the side to shut her up.

"Ow," Luz whined, rubbing her side, though it hadn't really hurt. "What was that for?"

"Shh." Edi's ears went back, her teeth poking out in what was probably supposed to be a warning. "Let him talk."

Wyn spun on his toes, turning to pace the length of the wall while his hand ran up and down the length of his arm. "Sorry," he said. "I'm not really used to this yet. Coran thinks I should tell people, but..."

Edi's scowl vanished in an instant, and she crossed to Wyn's side, clapping a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, Wyn. You don't have to tell us if you're not ready."

Luz wanted to argue with that--she was curious, now that Wyn had brought it up. If he didn't want to tell them, then he shouldn't have teased them like this.

But Wyn was faster, shaking his head and turning to face Edi head-on. "No," he said, squaring his shoulders. "I want to. I just... don't know how." He bit his lip. "Have either of you ever heard of _ulsyncrea_?"

"I don't think so..."

"Is that an alien thing?" Luz asked. "Cause I've never heard of it."

"No, yeah." Wyn screwed his eyes shut. "Quiz'k. No, it's an Altean term. I guess you _wouldn't_  have ever heard it. And I don't know what other people call it."

Edi leaned against the wall beside him, her ears sloped back in concern. "Okay... Well, what does it mean?"

"It means... I've been lying to you. Well--" He huffed, making a face at nothing and then rolling his head back. "I've been hiding from you. _We've_  been hiding from you."

Luz tilted her head to the side. "We?"

Wyn nodded, wrapping his arms around his middle. "Yeah. I'm not always _me_ , I guess you could say. Sometimes it's someone else. You've already met Rowan, even if you didn't know it, and I think you've met Leth, too. Rowan says he's the one who was fronting for most of the time the castle was captured."

"What do you mean? Fronting? What's that?" Luz caught a warning look from Edi and bit down on the rest of the flood of questions she wanted to ask. She was confused, and she wanted to understand, but she supposed considering how hard it had been for Wyn to say anything, it probably _was_  better to take it slow. _Maybe._

"Fronting is like..." Wyn waved a hand. "Being in control of the body. There are a few of us who share it, and sometimes two or three of us are... awake, I guess? We're here, and we can see and hear and everything, and we can talk to each other--but only one of us will be at the controls. Usually. It's easier that way."

"Is anyone else awake right now?"

"Rowan," Wyn said, his smile crooked. "He's kind of a nervous wreck, even though _he's_  done this before."

"This?" Edi asked.

Wyn waved a hand. "Told someone about us. He told Coran. He was a nervous wreck after that, too, to be fair. I don't think he knows what to do with people knowing he exists."

"Well, _I'm_  glad I know he exists," Luz said, because that was just sad, and even if she still didn't understand everything, she knew that people shouldn't have to get used to being ignored.

Edi beamed at Luz, then put an arm around Wyn's shoulders. "Me too. Thanks for telling us. I'm sure it wasn't easy."

"It wasn't." Wyn smiled, suddenly bashful, and rubbed his nose. "I keep expecting it to be harder than it is, though."

"Oh, yeah? Why's that?"

He shrugged. "I guess I just expect people to react different. The only times anyone ever acknowledges people like us, its to make us the villain in a holo. I don't know if people actually buy into that, but..." He looked like he was caving in, hugging himself and slumping against the wall. "It always felt safer not to say anything."

"That's dumb," Luz said, climbing to her feet and stomping across the gap between them to latch onto Wyn's waist. "I'm sorry people are like that. Are you gonna tell Mateo and Maka?"

He hesitated, then nodded. "You think I should?"

"Definitely." Edi's voice was firm, and she squeezed Luz's shoulder as she joined in on the hug. "Maka's an idiot sometimes, but he's not a bad person."

"Mateo, too," Luz added. "He'll be happy you shared your secret with him."

"Okay," Wyn said. "Okay. Then I'll tell them." He returned Luz's hug, and she didn't say anything about the way his hands were shaking. "Thank you."

* * *

Val lost track of how long she spent in Green's Heart. An hour? Two? Long enough that the scents and sounds of the jungle stopped feeling so alien and started to feel a little more like communication.

That's what it _was_ , she supposed. A language. Not the images Blue had started with. Not the emotions or the impulses that bled through the bond without her even really noticing. Not the words she'd gotten used to hearing from Blue. But still a language, and one she thought she might be able to learn. It would take time, but not as much time as she'd feared when she first reached out to Green.

She was hungry by the time she returned to her body in the real world--but more than that, she was bursting with new ideas. Blue and Green were connected, and Val shared in that connection. Their _Hearts_  were connected. It was all the same place, just different points on the map. Which meant she might have found the last piece she needed to do what she'd set out to do all those months ago.

Find their missing loved ones. Reach out, across galaxies, to locate them, to _see_  them. To figure out where they were and how to bring them home.

She just needed to be sure it would work with the Green Lion thrown into the mix. Because it would have to be Green, if Val was going to connect with Pidge to find their dad, and there was no way she was going to promise them something she couldn't follow through on. Not after everything else they'd been through.

She grabbed her books and notes on her way to the kitchen, flipping through the pages to double check on a few things. She'd been living with her head stuffed full of Quintessence theory for months now, but she still didn't trust herself to get everything right, and she _needed_  to be right.

She ate while she read--a bowl of plain goo, since that didn't take much thought--and when she was done, she went to find Nyma.

"You busy?"

Nyma frowned. "Not at the moment... Why?"

"I want to try something. Meet me in the Heart?"

* * *

Pidge tried not to venture out too much during the day. The castle was busier than ever--all the paladins scurrying around between missions, the Guard gaining members with every passing day, and now the delegation from New Altea. It seemed every time Pidge left their room, they inevitably wound up running into someone who wanted to talk to them, or stopped to gawk over the real live paladin. Worse yet were their friends, who weren't overawed or trying to garner favors but instead tiptoed around them, looking every second like they wanted to turn around and bolt.

Keith had that exact look on when Pidge ran into him in the corridors by the workrooms nearest the paladins' living quarters. Pidge, Matt, and Hunk had claimed them early on, and they still kept most of their supplies inside, except for whatever they might need for their current projects.

Seeing as all of Pidge's ongoing projects were in the Green Lion's hangar--or inside Green herself--that made the workrooms the only place they could go for tools once the extremely sparse kit in their bedroom proved ineffectual.

Ryner's second legacy still refused to give up its secrets, but Pidge wasn't throwing in the towel yet. As long as they couldn't pilot Green, this was the most useful thing they could do for their team.

They just had to _figure it out._

"Pidge," Keith said, a full ten seconds after they'd locked eyes, both of them stopping in their tracks. Pidge shoved their hands into their hoodie's pocket and scowled at him, daring him to ask if they were doing _okay_  or comment on how _good_  it was to see them outside their room.

Instead, Keith scratched his cheek and glanced over his shoulder. "Matt's in his workshop," he said. "We were just talking about Red."

Pidge squinted, trying to figure out if that was supposed to be a hint. _He's been worried about you. Maybe you should spend some time together._ Or was it a warning? _Turn back now, while you still can._

Then again, this was Keith. He probably didn't mean anything by it. "How is she? Red, I mean."

Keith grimaced. "She's talking to us again. Which is good, except that most of what she says is grumbling about not being able to fly yet. Matt's hoping to get through the last of the repairs tomorrow, if only to shut her up." He gave a wry smile that faltered quickly when Pidge didn't echo it quick enough.

(They tried to. It was just hard to muster a smile for much of anything these days.)

"Anyway," Keith said, scratching his neck and shuffling his feet. This was the part where he made some excuse to run away--it was either that, or guilt them into being social, but Keith was squarely in the first camp. "Need me to grab anything for you?"

Well, close. It was one step shy of outright assuming they didn't want to deal with people, which was more than they could say of any of the other paladins they'd run into this week. "Thanks for the offer, but do you even know what a zymferimma is?"

"Uh..." Keith wrinkled his nose.

"I'll take that as a no." Pidge's lips twitched--but even they could tell it still wasn't really a smile. Maybe closer to a grimace. "Thanks for the offer." They started past him, then thought better of it. "Actually... Are you doing anything?"

"What? No. Not, uh, not anything important."

They frowned at him. "Are you sure?"

He turned, snapping to attention like he did when Shiro or Allura were giving out orders. "I'm sure." He paused. "Why?"

They shrugged. How did they say that they were lonely, but that people hovering made it worse? How did they say they were sick of their mother's incessant coaxing to be more social and the way Matt hedged every single word he said and most of all their own thoughts? That Keith might have been awkward and unsure, but it was his usual brand of awkward and unsure, and that was somehow more comforting than endless hours of concern?

That Keith was one of the only people on this ship who understood that silence didn't need to be filled and distance didn't need to be crossed, and that just being there, doing your own thing, was _nice_ , sometimes.

"I'm just trying to get my mom off my back, okay? It's no big deal if you have things to do."

"I don't," Keith said, a little too quickly. "You want me to...?"

"Go get something to do. A book or whatever, I don't care. My room's too small for training, but whatever else you wanna do is fine. I'll probably just ignore you, to be honest."

"Okay..."

Pidge waved him off, hoping they didn't regret this, and stormed the last few doors to Matt's workroom.

"Don't," they said, before Matt had even noticed they were there.

"Pidge--?"

They held up a hand, making a beeline for the tools they needed. "Just grabbing a few things."

"What are you--?"

"Sorry, can't stay." Rude? Maybe. But every time they spent more than a few minutes with Matt lately, the air itself started to strangle them, tying their tongue in knots until they couldn't have said anything even if they could dredge up the words.

Matt turned as they headed for the door, a small arsenal of tools bundled in their arms. "Are you sure?" he called. "I wouldn't mind the company."

"Can't," they called back, not slowing. "Keith's waiting for me."

They were out the door before he could reply, though they hear a baffled, " _Keith?_ " drift out after them and smiled as they took side corridors back to their room. It was a little longer than heading straight there, but these passages didn't lead to anything useful, so hardly anyone used them, and that was all the justification Pidge needed.

Keith was already waiting for them by the time they arrived--just hovering in the hallway outside their room, a neon sign for anyone who might try to pry. Pidge hit the controls with their foot and shouldered Keith through the door. "In," they barked.

"Wh--?" He stumbled into the room, foot catching on the dirty laundry scattered across the floor. Pidge had been meaning to pick it up, but they hadn't gotten around to it yet, and they'd deliberately avoided letting their mother into their room for the last few days. The less she knew about the state of their room, the less she would worry.

Keith caught himself on the desk, and watched in silence as Pidge settled in, arranging their tools in an arc across their desk with the metal seed at the center.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Project," Pidge said shortly. "Don't mind me."

He lingered for about ten seconds too long, his silent watchfulness making the back of Pidge's neck crawl, before finally retreating to the bed and making himself comfortable against the wall with Pidge's pillow tucked behind his back. He must have brought a stim toy with him, because almost at once a soft, steady clicking filled the air. He lasted all of five minutes before he broke out the small talk.

"You hear about the Balmera?"

"Yeah," Pidge said, distracted, hoping an affirmative would head off whatever else he was going to say.

Of course they weren't that lucky. "Delegation from the Migration arrived a couple days ago. They talked with Shay and the other Elders. Sounds like they decided to welcome Metos, Theros, and Atsiphos into their Migration."

"Mm-hmm." Pidge frowned as the zymferimma, an Altean device that measured a particular type of radiation, gave no reaction to the seed. They tossed it aside and picked up the quinsiv, which was supposed to be able to hook into Quintessence flows.

"Shiro seemed pretty excited about it. I guess it's safer, since the Empire doesn't seem to know the Migratory Paths very well. They should be able to stay hidden, just in case Haggar decides to send the Vkullor out again."

The motion of Pidge's hands stopped for a moment, and Keith muttered a curse.

"Sorry," he said. "That was..." He coughed, and the clicking started up again. "What are you working on?"

Pidge set down the quinsiv and the seed and spun their chair around, steepling their hands and taking a deep breath. "Keith. Look. You don't need to make small talk, but if you insist, I'd rather you talk about Vkullors than about Ryner, okay?"

Keith's fist closed around his stim toy, a series of interlocking metal rings. "You mean that thing was-- uh... Sorry." He frowned. "Seriously?"

"Seriously. Trust me, Keith, it's hard enough to think about her when it's just me and I don't have to pretend to be normal for someone else."

They cringed as soon as the words left their mouth, staring at the seed and counting the seconds until Keith pressed for answers. That's what Matt or their mother would have done.

But Keith just sat there, silent, for long seconds, and then the click of his rings resumed.

"Why'd you ask me here?"

The question hit them almost as hard as a question about their emotional state would have. Harder, because at least they would have expected the other. They stared at the wall, eyes burning, and shoved aside the truth in favor of a biting reply. "I don't know, why'd you agree to come?"

"Because you're family," Keith said at once. Almost as quickly, the click of the rings stopped, a heartbeat of silence punctuated by a curse, and then a clatter as the rings hit the floor. "Uh." Keith dove for the edge of the bed as Pidge turned to watch. His ears were quivering, and he snatched up his rings, staring intently at them and not moving from his crouched position beside the bed. "As good as, I mean. Because Matt-- You know."

Pidge smiled--actually smiled, the expression so ill-fitting on their face that it fled after only a moment. They glanced back at their desk, then stood and shuffled over to the bed and sat a few inches from Keith's shoulder.

"It just hard, okay?" they muttered, tucking their feet beneath them and crossing their arms atop their knees. "Talking about her. _Thinking_  about her. I don't... People have died before. Relatives. Family friends. I guess I didn't know any of them as well as I knew Ryner, but it didn't... It didn't _hurt_  when they died. Not really. It's different with Ryner. She was part of me. And now those parts of me are gone, and I don't know how I'm supposed to get over that."

Keith looked up at them, his eyes wide and his ears sloped back. "Pidge... Have you talk to your family about this?"

They shook their head. "They're already worried enough over me. They don't need to hear anything that's going to make them worry more."

After a moment of perfect stillness, Keith stood, perching precariously on the mattress beside Pidge. "I mean... We're all worried about you. What happened was..."

"Yeah." Pidge sighed, dropping their chin onto their crossed arms. "It's hard to be around people is all. I feel like they all expect me to be something I can't be right now."

"Oh. Should I...?" Keith glanced toward the door, but Pidge was already shaking their head.

"It's easier with you. You know what it's like to not be able to be--" They reached for the right word, one hand darting out to cut vague shapes in the air. "You know?"

Keith pulled one foot up onto the bed, hugging it with one arm as he stared in the direction of Pidge's desk. "I think I do. You want me to stay, then?"

They leaned over, their head thumping against his arm. "Please? Just... Don't make me talk about it."

"I can manage that." Moving slowly, every inch of him radiating uncertainty, he put an arm around their shoulders, and Pidge fought a ridiculous urge to burst into tears--or to pull Keith's arm around them like a blanket.

"Okay," they said. "And for the record? You _are_ family. Matt or no Matt."

Keith's grip on them tightened, and Pidge smiled again as they leaned into his side.

* * *

"They're going to send us out again."

Sam wished he could say something to contradict Rolo's assertion, to stop the mounting pressure in his own chest, the panic building behind a dam run through with cracks. Would they send him after Pidge again? Or would Matt be his next target? Would either of them be able to get away, or would they kill Sam?

He hoped they did. They shouldn't have to live with that guilt--but it would be better than dying at their own father's hands.

"Most likely," he said, his voice steady only because of the hollowness that had settled into his chest.

Rolo looked at him, and then at Rax. The three of them were still in the cell, outside their bodies, keeping watch over Zuza, who had fallen asleep curled against Rolo's side. It was late, and the three of them should be sleeping, too, but it was hard to worry about that when a buzz was building in the lab. Every time Sam ventured out, he saw a flood of preparations: repairs and new additions to the lions, simulations running on the computers, druids and military officers debating targets and timelines.

Zarkon's three newest paladins had had their respite, but soon they were going to be back out there, weapons wielded against Voltron and against whichever helpless planets Zarkon decided to make an example of next.

The one consolation in all this was that Zuza wouldn't be joining them. She hadn't been taken at all since she'd first joined them in the cell, for reasons Sam couldn't fathom. Her name hadn't been added to the files listing the subjects of Vindication, either. It was like they'd captured her just to leave her to rot. (A merciful fate, all things considered.)

"What do we do?" Rolo asked, trying to sound angry and mostly coming up desperate.

"What _can_  we do?" Sam shot back. "You may not even be aware of what they make you do, and if you are, you won't be able to stop it."

Rolo's eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. "Well, with an attitude like that, we definitely won't be able to do anything."

Sam sighed and turned away as Rax huffed and dropped his chin into his hand. "Is he not right? We are powerless in this, Rolo. The druids have made sure of that."

"They can't account for everything," Rolo insisted. "They don't know what we can do. They don't know how much we know."

"How will any of what we know aid us?"

"They made those lions out of living things. Prisoners. _Victims._ " Rolo flung a hand out, emphatic. "Our hands are tied, but what if theirs aren't?"

Rax scoffed aloud. "You expect to be able to reason with a Weblum? With a _Vkullor_?"

Sam didn't think Rax knew what a Vkullor was any better than Sam himself, but they both knew that Rolo was terrified of the things, and it brought him up short for a moment, before he went on in a slightly subdued tone. "None of us is bonded to the Vkullor, thankfully. And _your_  lion is made from a Balmera. If any of us is going to be able to do this, it's you, so I don't know why you're complaining."

Sam closed his eyes, then opened them again as the memory of Pidge, small and terrified, flashed before him. He sighed, turning back toward the others. "Rolo is right. It's a long shot, but it's the only plan we've got right now. We can't stop them from taking us, so we're just going to have to do the best that we can."

"However little it may be," Rax muttered.

Rolo punched him lightly on the shoulder, making him sway on the spot. "That's the spirit," he said, forcing levity into his tone Sam knew he wasn't feeling. They were all tired lately, all fighting against despair as they faced the reality that they were little more than pawns in someone else's war.

It was that little bit that Sam clung to now. They had a chance. A slim one, to be sure, but Sam would chase it as far as he could and hope it was enough.

"We should rest," he said, reaching out to pat Rolo's arm. "I expect they'll come for us soon. Best to at least be clear-headed when it happens."

Rolo nodded, and Rax didn't argue. He couldn't muster true optimism, Sam supposed, but he wouldn't deny the sense in Sam's suggestion. They dissipated, their breath faltering for a moment as they settled back into their bodies. Sam lingered a moment longer, watching them sleep. He hoped something came of this plan, he really did.

If not, he wasn't sure any of them would be able to cling on to hope.

* * *

It was a few days before Val was willing to say that it worked. They never had enough time, and they kept getting called away on missions, but they stole an hour here, thirty minutes there, and they tested it all one step at a time--Val alone or with Nyma, or once Coran. Val could still bilocate from the island when she entered the Heart through Green. She could still find the others, bilocate with them, draw on their familiarity to locate someone she didn't know.

Anything she'd learned how to do in Blue's Heart, it seemed, she could do from Green. It made sense. The lions were all connected through Voltron; their Hearts were all different regions of the same space. Why _shouldn't_  it all work with Green? But Val needed to be _sure._ She even asked for Karen's help once, shaking so bad she could barely get the question out.

 _I'm not there yet_ , she warned, right from the start. _But it's a step in the right direction, and I need to know if it still works without anyone else to link me to Blue._

And Karen was a sensible, cynical person when she wanted to be. She knew there were still hurdles to jump and problems to work out. If that wasn't true, Val never would have gone to her with this, even though she was the only one besides Pidge who would work for this test. 

Even so, when Val and Karen and Green all finally figured out the trick to getting Karen to the Heart, Val still felt anxious hope drumming away inside Karen's chest.

When they successfully bilocated, together, to the personal quarters of a woman named Daapth--a legal clerk from the Coalition who had been consulting with Karen lately--the implications nearly reduced Karen to tears.

 _There's still a few more things I need to work out,_  Val had said into the awkward silence that filled the Green Lion's cockpit after they'd returned. They'd run a few more tests, but most of them had failed. It was the same as with Coran: the adjunct bond worked with bilocation, but only in a limited sense. Val didn't have nearly the range with them as with another paladin.  _I don't know how long it'll take. But you know I'll come to you the_ second  _I've figured it out. We're gonna find him, Mrs. H. We're almost there._

They were even closer than Val was willing to admit out loud, really. Val had all the pieces of the puzzle. She'd figured out tandem bilocation. She'd figured out how to seek out a person instead of a place, and how to use someone else's connections to do so. She'd used Blue's Quintessence to boost her range.

She'd found Meri from halfway across the universe, and brought not only herself but both Nyma _and_  Lance along. True, Meri had the advantage of being connected to all three of them, not to mention the Blue Lion herself--but it was impossible to ignore the fact that Val had already done exactly what she'd been working towards for months.

All she really had to do now was figure out how to replicate it.

"I can't promise anything," she told Nyma. They stood together on the cliffside, staring up at the lighthouse with its beam shining out into the darkness. It was night here in the Heart, apparently. Val hadn't realized this place _had_  a day-night cycle.

Actually, she wasn't sure it _was_  a cycle; they seemed to be frozen in the last instant before dawn, a smudge of pink and gold on the horizon, for the last half hour. (She couldn't say why they'd walked all this way, except that she was putting off the inevitable, and jumping straight here would have felt far too abrupt.)

"Even if you did," Nyma said, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes never leaving the lighthouse, "I wouldn't believe you."

That was a lie, and they both knew it. Nyma was cynical, and defensive, and pessimistic ( _realistic_ ), but here in the Heart their minds bled together. Their thoughts followed the same tracks. They were both thinking about Meri, and about what that meant. They'd run every test they could run, proven every piece of the process.

Val caught Nyma's eye and the yearning that had kept her breathless the entire walk redoubled, drawing them both toward the smooth white wall of the lighthouse.

They needed this--not just Nyma, but Val. She wanted so _badly_  for Nyma to be happy. For one thing to go right after a lifetime of pain and disappointment.

They linked hands, Val giving Nyma's an encouraging squeeze, and pressed their other hands to the wall, Nyma's flush against the stone, Val's covering it. She closed her eyes, leaned into Nyma's mind, quieted her thoughts and let Nyma's bond with Rolo fill the silence. The yearning, the desperation, swelled until it had Val swaying on the spot, and then the world around her seemed to tilt, and her stomach gave a lurch.

She opened her eyes to the dim glow of cockpit lights off screens and instrument panels, the whir of electronics and steady rumble of an engine settling into her bones. The thud of disappointment made her screw her eyes shut again, as though she could undo whatever mistake had kicked her out of the Heart if she just ignored it hard enough.

Two things hit her at the same moment: first, the lighting was wrong. She'd come from the Green Lion's cockpit, but the lights here were blue. Second, she was still holding Nyma's hand.

She opened her eyes again, heart pounding, and took a second look around the space she'd landed in. It was a cockpit, yes. Its layout was almost identical to that of the Blue Lion, except that had only one seat for the sole pilot. They stood behind that seat, staring out through the viewscreen at open space, stars glittering all around them.

Nyma's breath rattled in the air, expectant, and Val didn't hear her take another breath. She was shaking, her palm sweaty in Val's hand, and she hardly seemed to notice when Val gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

"Nyma...?"

This time it was Val whose breath left her in a rush, and she spun, her chest too tight to inhale as she searched for the source of the voice. Nyma had gone rigid beside her, frozen, her eyes wide and wet as she stared straight ahead at nothing.

It was Val who saw him first--real, and solid, and translucent, and insubstantial in a way she couldn't pinpoint. He wore the same clothes as the last and only time she'd seen him, but she blinked through a sudden swell of tears, and it was a prison uniform he wore, and a dark mockery of the paladin armor. He was healthy and wasted and bloodied and hollow, all shifting, like he was all of these things and none of them, all at once.

It was impossible, but it was undeniable, and Val's mouth was so dry, her mind so blank, she hardly sounded like herself when she finally remembered how to breathe and whispered his name.

" _Rolo._ "


	9. Hallucinations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... After months of experimentation and research, Val finally did it: She and Nyma projected themselves across the universe to the cockpit of the Dark Blue Lion and came face to face with Rolo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Grief and discussions of death in the first scene, but it's not quite as heavy as it's been so far this season.

It started with a simple question: _Are you busy?_ Innocent. Innocuous.

It stopped Matt in his tracks all the same.

As it happened, he _wasn’t_ doing anything more important than organizing his workroom after a days-long marathon of repairs on the Red Lion--but even if he’d been on his way to answer a top-tier distress call, he would have dropped it in an instant to be there for Pidge. If they were ready to talk--about everything, or only a small sliver of it--then he would listen. If they were reaching out to _him_ , instead of merely caving to his requests for companionship, then he would be there.

He just hated that he didn't know how to make things not awkward.

Pidge had found him in his workroom, shuffling their feet and fiddling with one stim toy or another in the pocket of their hoodie as they shot anxious looks over their shoulder. He had, of course, let them in, and they'd sat in expectant silence for five minutes, Pidge kicking their feet, Matt trying not to stare so hard he made them uncomfortable.

When it finally got to be too much for him, and he suggested they go for a walk, Pidge had all but jumped at the idea. They showed no sign of asking whatever it was they wanted to ask him or doing whatever they wanted to do, but they seemed a little less on edge once they were moving, and as Matt silently steered them away from the more populated areas of the castle, he felt the tension in the air between them start to melt away.

Somewhere near the top of Red Tower, Pidge finally broke the silence.

"I'm sorry I've been stonewalling you lately."

"No, hey." Matt turned toward them, resisting the urge to squeeze their shoulder or stoop to be eye level with them (not that he'd have needed to stoop much these days; Pidge had finally hit a growth spurt, and they were rapidly closing the distance between them.) He settled for a smile as Pidge stopped beside him, their shoulders hunched. "You don't need to apologize for anything. I'm sorry if I was too pushy."

They were already shaking their head. "You were just worried. I get it."

They started walking again, and Matt fell into step beside them, watching the bounce and bob of their hair as they slumped along. He wished he knew what was going on inside their head. He wished he knew how to help, or even what they needed him to help _with_. It was obvious to anyone that they were hurting, but he couldn't bring Ryner back or undo what Haggar had done to their dad, so he was left feeling helpless as Pidge drowned in the heart of a storm that seemed to have targeted them with a vengeance.

"I don't know that this is something I can talk about." Pidge's voice was small, muffled from the way they ducked their head, but here in the quiet of the upper reaches of a mostly-deserted tower, it was easy to hear. "Not-- I don't mean it's too hard. I mean... I don't know if I have the words for it. Losing Ryner like that--" Their voice hitched.

This time, there was no chance for second thoughts. Matt swung around in front of Pidge and wrapped them in a hug, leaning his cheek on the top of their head as their breathing wavered on the edge of tears.

"We were inside Green when she-- When she died." Pidge curled their arms around him. "I was inside her head."

The breath rushed out of Matt at that. He'd known Pidge and Ryner were close; of course he had. They’d been co-paladins. But the paladin bond was more than just an emotional closeness. How many times had he _felt_  Keith, on a visceral level? How many times had the lines between them blurred until they felt like one mind straddling two bodies? And it was all the more intense inside Red.

What would it be like, to be joined like that, only for half of that mind to be ripped away?

Matt squeezed them tighter, holding on until they started to pull away. Once they did, he released them at once. However much he wanted to cling to them, to squeeze all the pain out, he knew he'd hurt them by being so clingy lately. Better to hold back, to deal with his own hurt on his own and not foist it off on Pidge.

"I, uh..." Pidge coughed, rubbing their nose with the back of their hand. "I talked with Keith, a little." A pause, a tilt of their head. "If you can call it talking. But I... That was the first time I was able to put anything into words, even if it was just to tell him why I didn't want him to pry."

Matt wasn't going to jump on that, but he couldn't stop a sad smile from crossing his face. "Well, he's good at not prying. Better than me, for sure."

Pidge's lips twitched. "Oh, for sure."

Matt scowled. "You don't have to be rude." But the set of Pidge's shoulders was looser as they moved on, and Matt didn't feel so much like he had to watch every single thing he said. Which maybe was more of his own hangup than anything to do with Pidge, now that he thought about it.

They turned a few more corners before Pidge spoke again. "I guess I just want to start. To _try._  I don't know what to do after everything that happened... I don't... It's too much. But I think I'm ready to start--start picking up the pieces, I guess."

"It's okay if it takes time," Matt said. "Nothing has to happen all at once."

Pidge's bottom lip wavered, but they nodded once, emphatically. "Yeah. Thanks, Matt."

He leaned over between one step and the next, bumping his shoulder against theirs. They stumbled, then leaned back over and headbutted him back, and he laughed as he tugged them down another hall, toward the observatory that had become one of his and Shiro's favorite haunts.

It was dark within, the lights turned down to a bare minimum--only a few indicator lights on the instrument panels around the edges of the room and a band of safety illumination around the floor. Pidge went similarly quiet as they stepped inside, tipping their head back to stare up at the stars visible through the dome overhead.

"I miss her," they whispered. "So much."

Matt didn't know what to say to that, so he just pressed a hand to their back, breathing out as they leaned against him. He rubbed their back, up and down, then caught their eye and tilted his head toward the gravity controls. They smiled faintly, and Matt took that as an okay. He flipped a switch, curling his arm around Pidge's shoulder at the same moment to hold them close as their feet lifted off the ground.

"I'm so sorry, Pidge," he said. "I wish I could make it stop hurting."

They gave a feeble laugh, going boneless as they drifted out into the center of the room. "Me too. It helps having something else to think about."

Matt hummed, craning his neck for a better view of the stars. "Wanna make up some constellations?"

"Depends. Are you gonna veto the Pigeon again?"

Matt chuckled. "Come on. That's practically a tradition at this point. Besides, you never let it stop you before."

* * *

Rolo was hallucinating.

He had to be; there was no other explanation. Nyma was here, dressed in _paladin_  armor, of all things, and both she and her friend--a human, and also a paladin, apparently--could _see_  Rolo.

The tears, Rolo would admit, were an odd thing to hallucinate. In the ten years they'd known each other, Rolo had seen Nyma cry only once: after losing their entire crew, all their friends, including Nyma's girlfriend Talla.

He turned away, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes as he struggled to get his breathing under control. He felt like he was hyperventilating, and even reminding himself that that wasn't even possible when he didn't have lungs didn't help. Nothing felt real. Nothing _had_  since the druids had put him under. He'd clung onto consciousness, clawed his way back to the surface, managed to gather his wits sometime after his lion had launched. He was alone now, drifting through open space--waiting for the signal to attack, presumably.

It felt like swimming through tar, but he'd tried to reach out to the Niskaia at the lion's core. He had nothing else to do, and he was the one who'd argued in favor of this plan to start with. He owed it to Sam and Rax to give it his level best.

Thing was, he didn't know a damn thing about Niskaia or what they could do. Maybe they were astral creatures, like the shadows from deep space traders' tales--things that didn't live in the physical realm but could cross the boundaries between reality and unreality, warping time and space and inciting hallucinations in anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with the creatures.

He hadn't felt any response from the Niskaia after an hour of trying, but maybe it was more aware of him than he thought.

"Rolo?" Nyma asked, her voice strangled and tired and softer than he remembered--softer, but sharper at the same time. "Is that really you?"

It wasn't real. He screwed his eyes shut, squeezing out the tears that had begun to gather, and tried to ground himself in reality. That was the empty shell of his body in the pilot's seat, a silver knot at the base of his skull and a uniform yellow glow filling his eyes.

A hand landed on his shoulder, solid and warm and _real_ , and even as he tried to tell himself it was all in his head, he couldn't help but turn, losing ground in the battle against his tears when he saw Nyma a second time.

"You're not real," he whispered. "You can't be."

"Isn't that our line?" The human cringed as Rolo and Nyma both turned her way. She was teary-eyed, too, but she'd held back when Nyma approached, and she glanced over her shoulder now as though looking for a way to excuse herself. "I mean... _Nyma._  Think about it. We're astral projections. Nobody's supposed to be able to see us! How come he can?"

It was so close to the trail of Rolo's own thoughts that he almost had to laugh. "Astral projections? Never heard of 'em."

"Well." The human huffed, deflating a little. "I don't know that that's an official term. We came here from the astral realm. Our bodies are still back on the castle-ship."

"You can separate?" he asked, skeptical. "How? Unless you've been letting druids experiment on you, that shouldn't be possible."

Indefinable emotions flickered across her face. "I wouldn't say I _let_  them do anything," she said, a little stiffly. "And that hasn't got anything to do with this, anyway!"

But Rolo had suddenly realized why she looked familiar--cleaner and healthier than the last time he'd seen her, to be sure, but she still had that fire in her eye, that stubborn set to her jaw. "Hold on... You're that chick who clocked Nyma with a gun."

The human flushed, Nyma pinched the bridge of her nose, and Rolo felt like the ground beneath him had tilted. He didn't know if this was too weird to be real, or too weird _not_  to be.

"Val," the human said. "I'm... My name's Val. You... kinda saved my life. So. Thanks. It's nice to actually meet you. If it is you?" She frowned. "How _are_  you here, anyway? We need to go through the lions to do this, and last I checked, robeasts don't have a Heart."

Rolo blinked, trying to put Val's words together in a way that made sense. "Can I be honest? I have no idea what you're talking about. I can do this because the druids ripped our Quintessence out of our bodies as part of turning us into their mindless paladin wannabes. Don't think they meant for us to be able to control when it happened, but I'm not complaining about that little oversight."

Nyma let out a choked cry like she wanted to laugh, but couldn't manage it through the tears. "So you are their Dark Blue...?"

"Why'd they have to separate your Quintessence from your body for something like that?" Val asked. "Wouldn't that just kill you?"

"If it was permanent? Probably." Rolo spread his arms wide. "But, look, this isn't exactly my area of expertise. Sam thinks it has something to do with bonding us to the lions, but I couldn't tell you how that--"

"Sam?" Val stepped forward, grabbing him by the hands. "Sam Holt? They _are_  holding you with him?"

Rolo took a step back, his heart skipping a beat. He'd seen Sam and Rax move like that--a single step carrying them across the room, the in-between compressed to the blink of an eye--but he hadn't expected to see it from the paladins, real or otherwise. "Yeah, sure. When they aren't sending us out to attack our friends and family."

Val stopped breathing. "You know about that?"

"Wish I didn't. Sam was a wreck when he came back from it. They made him fight his own _kid._ "

Another blink of the eye, and Val had retreated to just behind Nyma, her hands clapped over her mouth. "Nyma," she whispered. " _Nyma_."

"I know," Nyma said.

" _Nyma--_ " Val cut off with a hiss, and for an instant she and Nyma flickered. Outright disappeared, though they reappeared again before Rolo could move. "Fuck," Val murmured. She reached out, squeezing Nyma's wrist. "This is harder than I thought it would be. I'll hang on as long as I can, but..."

She trailed off, watching Nyma for another few seconds until Nyma nodded, offering her a weak smile before patting her hand and stepping away. Val moved again, this time to the far side of the cockpit, leaving Rolo and Nyma with as much privacy as the small space allowed. He stared at her, his thoughts slowing to a trickle.

"This isn't a hallucination, is it?" he asked.

Nyma choked on a laugh, the tears flowing freely down her cheeks. "Gods, I hope not."

He laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth. They moved at the same instant, meeting each other halfway. Nyma crushed him against her, her fingers digging into his skin in a way that would have been painful if he wasn't reeling from the fact that it was happening at all. He hugged her back, cautiously at first, and then clinging tighter, hooking his chin over her shoulder and staring sightlessly at the far wall.

"You're a _paladin_?"

She chuckled. "Yeah. Someone was high when they made that call, right?"

He shook his head, huffed, let his forehead drop onto her shoulder. "No. You deserve it, Nyma. You of _all_  people."

"Fuck you," she mumbled, her voice shaking. He wouldn't have thought she could squeeze him any tighter, but she managed it, and he wheezed as she did. "I _missed_  you."

"Right back at ya," he said. "Are you...? How have you been, besides the whole paladin thing?"

She pulled back, anger sparking in her eyes. "Are you serious right now? I'm _fine._  I didn't go and get myself--fucking-- Are _you_ okay? Where are they keeping you?"

"I don't know," he said. "If they have the lab's coordinates stored anywhere on site, we haven't been able to find it."

She snorted, and it occurred to him that she probably thought he was being sarcastic. Probably wouldn't believe half of what had happened to him for that matter. It didn't matter, anyway. She was _here._

He worried his lip, sorting through a thousand questions too trivial to waste time on. He didn't know how long they had, but he was going to make it count. "How long has it been?"

The question hit Nyma like a slap to the face, and she pulled away, crossing her arms over her chest. "A year. We've been looking-- _I've_  been looking for you, but I didn't have any solid leads, and I--I thought you were _dead_ , Rolo! I had no idea--I--"

He took her by the shoulders, shushing her before she could work herself into a panic attack. _This_ was familiar ground. This guilt, this defensiveness. This was a Nyma he'd seen before, and more often that either of them would have liked. This was the Nyma he'd comforted after every ally--every _friend_ \--died in a mission gone wrong. This was easy, because he'd said these words to her before.

"It's not your fault, Nyma. Shit happens, and you can try to stop it, but sometimes the universe just won't listen. You can't blame yourself for that."

She quieted, still hugging herself, but leaning forward until she was close enough for Rolo to hold her again. "I _know_. Shut up." She huffed, one hand loosening its grip on her armor long enough to press against his chest, fingers splayed, Rolo's phantom heartbeat pounding against her palm. "I should be the one comforting _you_." Her voice dropped low. "Damn selfish bitch."

"Stop that," he chided. "I happen to _like_ comforting you. Besides." He closed his eyes, listening to her breathing even out. "It's enough that you're here."

"Nyma--" Val spoke through clenched teeth, and at once Nyma stiffened in Rolo's arms. "I'm sorry. I can't--I'm losing my grip."

" _Vrekt_ ," Nyma hissed. She pulled back, grabbing Rolo's shoulders and giving him a shake. "Hold on. You hear me? Just hold on a little longer. I'm coming for you." Her eyes were wide, her cheeks glistening with tears, a wild terror burning through her. "We'll come again like this, or--or we'll find you. I'm going to get you out of there."

"I know you will."

Val appeared suddenly at her side, a cautious hand reaching for her shoulder. "Nyma, I'm _sorry--_ "

Nyma was still staring at him, still terrified, still raw in a way he'd only seen her when they'd lost Talla, and as she started to fade, she surged forward, pressing her lips to his, her fingers digging into his shoulder, sliding up the back of his neck--into his hair, under the cap he used to wear (his favorite; he'd forgotten about it somewhere in the last year)--over the druids' newest addition, the little device that locked him out of his own body.

It was electric, that kiss. Paralyzing. He lifted his hands, wanting to hold, to embrace, to pull her closer. Wanting to push her away, because he knew--he _knew_ \--that she only had one rule. Men were marks, never partners. She must not have been thinking straight.

Well, he wasn't either, because all he could think about was how soft her lips were against his, how she held him until he ached, how he never wanted this moment to end.

Then she was gone, and Rolo was left holding empty air and wondering whether he'd imagined it all.

* * *

Val's heart, it seemed, was trying to work its way out of her chest by any means necessary. It slammed against her ribs as she raced through the castle's halls, and in the fifteen seconds she was stuck in the elevator, she thought she was actually going to be sick.

_It worked._

After months of theorizing and experimentation and hopes being dashed time after time after time, she'd finally made it work, deliberately and at will. Bilocation across a massive distance, _to_ a specific person she knew primarily by reputation.

So of course she couldn't find the Holts anywhere. She checked Red's hangar, Matt's workroom, the bridge, the rec room, all three of their bedrooms, and the kitchen before finally stumbling across Akira instead. She stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, glowering at him and at Eli, both of whom had committed the grave offense of not being a Holt, and promptly turned to race out, ignoring the way Akira's mouth puckered with the beginning of a question.

Val made it two steps before realizing that Akira might be able to help her. She spun on the ball of her foot and dashed back into the kitchen, crossing to Akira and taking his face between her hands. "Where's Matt?"

Akira's brow furrowed. "I don't--"

"Shh. Don't think. Where is he?"

"Top of Red Tower," Akira said at once, his hand swinging to point up and back at the same moment. "Hell if I know why. There's nothing up there but a bunch of storage and one of about a billion observatories."

Val didn't stay to hear Akira's thoughts on the matter. She turned and ran for the door, not slowing when Akira called after her.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing!" Val shouted, grabbing the door frame and sliding as she turned the corner. "I'll tell you later!"

Then she was running again, back to the elevator, up to the next bridge level, out to Red Tower, then up another interminably long elevator ride to the very top floor. In Blue Tower, this place was taken up by a massive hot spring area. Here, there was just a big, round room with a big, clear dome.

It was also one of the few places in the castle that had easily toggled gravity controls, as Val discovered when she charged through the door only to find herself ragdolling through the air with zero control of her own body. She let out a strangled shout, flailing like a cat in the bath in search of something solid to latch onto.

" _Val?_ "

Pidge's voice was a welcome anchor in the disorienting swirl of stars and indicator lights, but the real saving grace was Matt's hand on first one arm, then the other--stopping her spin and stabilizing her until they were both floating within reach of a handhold along the upper part of the dome.

Val clung to it, grateful for the lifeline, and swiped at her hair as she grinned at Matt and then at Pidge. Karen didn't seem to be here, but two out of three wasn't bad. "Hey," she said, even more breathless than she should have been from running around the castle like a madwoman. "We did it."

Matt shot a look at Pidge. "Did... what?"

Val flailed her arms, forgetting about the whole zero-G thing for a moment and having to catch herself before she drifted out into the open space at the center of the dome. "The-- _thing_." She squeaked, reeling herself back toward the wall. "The bilocation thing. Nyma and I just talk to Rolo."

Val didn't have to say anything else--not about how they'd done it, or where they'd found him, or the fact that he'd been with Commander Holt sometime recently. They knew enough. Rolo was missing, probably whole galaxies away, they didn't know where, and Val had only met him once for a few minutes.

She'd found him anyway.

The reaction was instantaneous. Matt's grip on Val's arm tightened to the point of pain, and Pidge hesitated less than a second before kicking off the domed ceiling and slapping at the controls to turn the gravity back on. Val screeched as she dropped unceremoniously to the floor--only about five feet below her, but far enough for her stomach to leap into her throat.

"Sorry," Pidge said--more because Matt was glaring at them than out of any real remorse. "We-- Can we--?"

Val stood, brushing herself off. She hadn't seen Pidge like this--focused, energetic, and downright _hopeful_ \--since Ryner's death, and she didn't have it in her to be upset at a little surprise.

"Yeah," Val said. "Do you know where your mom is? She should hear this, too."

* * *

They found Karen in one of the archive access rooms, reading up on... well, honestly, Val wasn't sure. Something legal that she abandoned as soon as Pidge said that Val had found a way to get to Sam.

Which was absolutely true but might also give Karen some unrealistic expectations, so Val jumped in to lay it all out for them. Rolo's induction into Vindication, the way they'd separated him from his body, using it to fly Dark Blue without him, the way he was still _him_  even though they'd succeeded in making him a paladin, and had talked with Sam since the attack.

"The only catch is that what I do is directly tied to the lions--and to the paladin bonds. I've tried it with Coran--and with you, Mrs. H. So you know the link there just isn't as strong. I can carry you a little way, but not all the way across the universe. And when I tried bilocating with Keith the other day, I couldn't take him anywhere. I don't know what the hangup is--the lions are all connected once you're in the Heart--but at least for right now, it only works if me and whoever I'm taking have a bond with the same lion."

Pidge bit their lip. "You're bonded to Green now, though," they said, some of the all-too-familiar uncertainty creeping into their voice.

"Exactly," Val said. "It let me take your mom about as far as I could take Coran, so in theory, it should let me take you as far as I took Nyma." She glanced at Matt and Karen. "I... don't think I can take either of you. Not yet. Sorry."

Matt's face fell, though he quickly plastered on a smile. "It's okay."

Karen, too, looked disappointed, but she didn't seem surprised. She'd seen first-hand how much Val struggled to keep a hold on her on even just an orbital trip. She'd known then that she wasn't going to be the one to reach Sam. "If you can put us-- _any_ of us--in touch with him, that's more than enough. _But_ it's going to have to wait."

"What?" Pidge rounded on her, face promising a fight. "Why? If we can get to him--"

Karen quieted them with a hand on their shoulder, her eyes never leaving Val. "You need rest."

It wasn't a question, but Val floundered for an answer just the same. "I don't-- I'm fine, Mrs. H. I've only been up for, like, five--six... Eight? Hours." Val furrowed her brow, turning to search for a clock.

"Val, you're falling asleep on your feet," Karen said, leaving Pidge to take Val by the shoulders. "Bilocating _normally_ takes a lot out of you. After pulling yourself and Nyma all the way to wherever they're keeping Rolo, I'm surprised you're still awake at all. There's no way you can do the same thing again so soon."

In all honesty, Val hadn't stopped to think about how tired she was or wasn't. The high of finding Rolo, of all her experimentation and practice finally paying off, was an electric main plugged directly into her brain, and it had blotted out all other considerations. Now that Karen mentioned it, though, it started to hit her. The physical fatigue, the ache in her neck and shoulders, and the bone-deep exhaustion. She'd have dropped into the chair Karen had vacated a few moments ago, except she wasn't sure she'd be getting up again once she did.

Still, she hesitated. "Are you sure...?"

" _Sleep,_ " Karen said. "At least for a few hours. We'll keep ourselves busy in the mean time."

Pidge looked like they wanted to mutiny, and that alone was enough to make Val linger for another few moments. Then Karen threatened to get Coran involved, and Val finally relented, promising she'd meet them in the rec room in six hours. It wasn't going to be long enough; she could feel it. But Karen had talked her up to six from her first suggestion of three. Val felt guilty about the wait, but at the same time, she was grateful at least one of them was being reasonable about it.

Matt walked her back to her room, silently keeping pace beside her most of the way. That was probably for the best, seeing as Val was having enough trouble walking in a straight line without trying to carry out a conversation.

It was only once they exited the elevator to the hallway where they all had their rooms that he spoke up. "You... You really think he's okay? He's still...?"

Val stopped, the desperation in Matt's voice choking her up long before her brain was able to process what he was asking. "I'm as sure as I can be without actually talking to him," Val said. "I don't know when exactly Rolo last talked with your dad, but it was _after_  the attack. Sounds like he was devastated--but that means that he's still in there." She wrapped one arm around herself, grabbing her elbow. "It doesn't make it any _better_ , what they did to him, but it means we can bring him home. And we will. I promise."

"Can you do that? Bring him back?"

Val's heart dropped into her stomach, and she shook her head, her mouth drying up. "No," she said. "I'm sorry. Even with normal bilocation I can't bring things back, and even if I _could_ , bringing his Quintessence back without his body could kill him. But we'll find them. I swear we will. We'll find them, and we'll bring them home."

Matt swallowed, blinking a few times as he stared at his feet. Then he nodded, turned, and threw his arms around Val. " _Thank you._ "

Val stumbled backward under the force of Matt's hug, but she caught herself quickly and returned the gesture, swallowing tears of her own. She remembered what it had felt like when the Garrison told her Lance was dead. When no one would listen to her suspicions about the cover-up. The hole in her chest had left her perpetually breathless, always searching for a way to regain her footing. It had only gone on for a few weeks, and she'd always held out hope that the Garrison was just holding Lance and the others somewhere.

She couldn't imagine what it must be like for the Holts. They hadn't seen Sam in more than two years, and then when they finally did, the odds of getting him back alive--the odds of there even _being_ a Sam left to rescue--must have seemed vanishingly small.

She wasn't sure she deserved thanks for what she'd done so far, but she knew how much Matt needed to hear someone say it was going to be okay. If he had to hear it from Val, then she would say it, over and over until they had Sam, Rolo, and everyone else back safe and sound.

Matt clung to her for nearly a minute, shaking, his fingers digging into her shoulders, before abruptly pulling back. To Val's surprise, his eyes were dry, but his expression looked to be on the edge of shattering, and Val's heart went out to him.

"I should..." She jerked her thumb over her shoulder with an apologetic shrug. "Sooner I get some sleep, sooner we can get in touch with your dad."

"Yeah," Matt said. He ran his hands down his face, swiping a finger under each eye like he was trying to wick away tears. He smiled, feeble though it was. "Go on, and don't worry about it. We've waited this long. A few more hours won't hurt anything."

He didn't quite believe it, she could tell. But she appreciated the gesture. Didn't mean she wasn't going to sprint out of here as soon as her alarm went off.

* * *

Pidge was already sick of waiting.

From the moment their mother had chased Val off to rest, they'd been itching, skin crawling, legs jumping with the need to move. 

What they were supposed to _do_ with that energy, they didn't know. Maybe go down to Green in a feeble attempt to mend bridges that had burned over the course of the last few weeks. Because flinging themself at a bond so filled with hurt that it had reduced them to a sobbing mess the last time they got close was clearly the best course of action.

...Not that they weren't going to do that in a few hours, anyway. There was only one way to get to their dad, and Pidge wasn't going to let anything stop them.

Matt was almost as jittery as Pidge, when he finally returned from escorting Val across the castle. He burst through the rec room doors like a tornado of nerves, crossed straight to the couch and dropped down between Pidge, whose leg was already bouncing a mile a minute, and Karen, who arched an eyebrow without lifting her gaze from her tablet.

"Tell me how you really feel," she said.

Matt stared at her, opened his mouth, and then launched to his feet again to pace the circumference of the circular depression in the floor where the couch was situated. "This is happening," he said. "This is really happening."

"In a few _hours_ , it's happening." Pidge tried not to sound spiteful, but they weren't sure they succeeded.

Karen only hummed and swiped a finger across her tablet. "Better to wait a while and have a better chance at success than to rush into it and have Val pass out from overexertion."

Pidge wrinkled their nose.

"No, she's right, Pidge," Matt said, turning to pace back the other way around the couch. "Val was practically asleep on her feet by the time we made it to the residential floor."

Pidge stuck their tongue out at him. "I _know._ " They crossed their arms and slouched against the cushions. "Doesn't mean I have to _like_  it."

Karen actually smiled at that--smiled!--and flipped another page on whatever she was reading. "Why don't you find some way to distract yourself? Don't you have any projects you could pull up?"

Pidge glared at their laptop, which they'd brought to the rec room with the (rather optimistic) thought that they could be productive for the next few hours. As if they didn't have a hard enough time focusing these days anyway. As if they could make their legs stop bouncing, their fingers stop dancing, for long enough to open their computer.

Better to be restless, though. Better to hold onto the anticipation, the hope they barely dared to name. Better to imagine that they were going to find their dad, maybe find a way to talk to him, and to hold so tight to that hope that there wasn't room for anything else. Because they were walking a razor's edge, and they knew  the slightest push could send them toppling over the edge. It was all too easy to imagine that when they went with Val to find their dad, all they would find was a monster, or a hollow shell, no matter what Rolo might have told Val to the contrary.

The hiss of the door opening wrenched Pidge's attention in that direction, their heart leaping into their throat. They were expecting--what? Val, suddenly catching a second wind and coming to put an end to the waiting? A horde of Galra, just because this day was going too well, so clearly something needed to change?

Shiro stood in the doorway, though he faltered a step back as all three Holts rounded on him.

"Sorry," he said, suddenly unsure. "Akira said you needed me...?"

Matt breathed out, something that didn't quite manage to sound like a laugh. "Of vrekking course he would."

Shiro frowned. "So... you _don't_  need anything?"

"It's a different sort of need," Karen said, finally setting her tablet down. "Val and Nyma found Rolo."

Shiro, who had started forward, tripped down the steps to the couch, his eyes going wide. "They what?"

Karen's smile was shaky, the first sign she'd given in the last half hour that any of this was getting to her. "She did it. Val figure out how to reach them with her bilocation."

"Then--" Shiro sat abruptly on the edge of the couch, every inch of him tensed and waiting. "Sam?"

"We're hoping," Pidge said. "Val's pretty sure she can loop me into it the same way she looped in Nyma, so..." They cleared their throat, hating that they could feel the unasked questions hanging over their head. _Are you up for that? Are you going to be okay?_  It wasn't like anyone on the castle hadn't seen Pidge spiraling since Ryner's death. They all knew Pidge was having a hard time, and the fact that they hadn't yet gone back to flying Green was pretty damning--for the three people in this room right now most of all.

But what did they expect Pidge to say? That they were okay now? That they'd gotten over what happened and no one should worry about them anymore? That was a lie so baldfaced even Pidge would choke on the words. They _weren't_  okay. At all. Part of them wished it was Matt Val could take along, because if this didn't go the way they were hoping, Pidge honestly wasn't sure they could handle it.

It wasn't Matt who was bonded to the Green Lion, though. It was Pidge, and this was the only chance they had to get in touch with their dad. They had to take it. They had to figure out how to be okay enough to get though.

Pidge hugged their laptop to their chest and avoided Shiro's eyes, making their voice as steely as they could as they said, "Mom told Val to go get some rest before we try. Because she's a _masochist._ "

Karen only rolled her eyes. "Reaching out to Rolo took a lot out of her. I didn't want the next attempt to fail because she was too tired."

"That makes sense," Shiro said, because Shiro was a little _shit_ , apparently, and enjoyed pushing Pidge's buttons. He smiled at them, and they wrinkled their nose in return, and when Matt's pacing brought him back around that end of the couch, Shiro grabbed his wrist and pulled him closer.

Matt resisted for a moment, then yielded to Shiro's pull, stepping closer and laughing as Shiro wrapped his arms around Matt's legs.

"It's going to be okay," Shiro said.

"You can't know that."

Shiro hummed and just hooked his legs around Matt's, pulling him closer and doing an admirable impression of an overgrown koala. They stayed like that, Matt frozen on the edge of escape, not exactly relaxing in Shiro's embrace but not stepping away to resume his pacing, either.

Karen quickly went back to whatever she was reading on her tablet. Pidge watched her for several minutes in silence, shifting seamlessly between stressing over what was going to happen when Val got back and a steadily building irritation at the way their mother seemed so utterly blasé about it all.

"What the hell are you doing that's so interesting?" they finally asked, knowing they sounded petulant and wound too tight to care.

Karen swiped to turn the page, her eyes never leaving the screen. "Coalition business," she said. "I'm part of a panel of legal experts from different worlds who review proposed policies and offer feedback."

"Sounds _fascinating_ ," Pidge said dryly.

Shiro, though, cocked his head to the side. "This wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the Exvelta Proposition, would it?"

Matt frowned, glancing between Shiro, whose eyebrows were inching toward his hairline, and Karen, who smiled to herself as she continued reading. "Maybe."

"What's the Exvelta Proposition?" Matt asked.

"Adoption law," Shiro said. "Exvelta has an unusually high number of orphans and not enough families in a position to adopt, but there are plenty of families on other Coalition worlds willing and able to take them in. There's been a lot of call for the Coalition to establish a standard for interplanetary adoption--as I understand it, trying to navigate the laws of two planets and however many local layers of government might be involved makes it essentially impossible right now."

Shiro was openly grinning now, and Matt bit his lip as he stared at Karen. "Mom... Do you have something you'd like to tell us?"

"Nothing in particular, no."

"No?"

"No." Karen leaned her tablet down on her lap and met Matt's expectant look with a cryptic one of her own. "And _if_  that changes...I promise you'll be the second to know."

For some reason, that made Matt's face positively light up, but he promptly dropped the subject, and Pidge was entirely too tired to go digging for answers. They just frowned at Matt, and at their mother, and wedged themself into the corner of the couch, resigned to waiting out the next six hours.

* * *

Val had just settled into bed, her heavy limbs slowly winning out over the residual adrenaline, when she thought of Nyma.

 _Nyma,_ who had just seen Rolo for the first time in a year. _Nyma_ , who had sat alone in the Blue Lion while Val sprinted off to tell the Holts the good news. Val had been so absorbed with the possibilities this unlocked that she hadn't stopped to think--and landing in Green meant she hadn't even seen what sort of a state Nyma had been in in the aftermath.

She was so _stupid._

Cursing, Val ducked out of her room and hurried a few doors over to Nyma's room. She'd spent the night here a few times--more than a few, really--but they hadn't officially progressed from sleeping together to sharing a room, which left her in an awkward position where she wasn't sure whether or not she was still supposed to knock, or if this was enough of a shared space that she didn't need to bother.

She settled for a compromise, opening the door partway and knocking at the same time. "Nyma?" she called. "Are you in here?"

Nyma didn't answer, but Val must have startled her, because there was a sharp intake of breath, the rustle of a shifting mattress, and then more silence.

Frowning, Val abandoned the pretense of asking permission and opened the door the rest of the way. Nyma sat on the bed, her head in her hands, and said nothing as Val cautiously stepped inside, one hand lingering on the door frame.

"Hey..." Val paused, her throat constricting, though she didn't know what it was that had her heart racing all of a sudden. "You okay?"

A laugh escaped Nyma, the sound broken and jagged. "Am I _okay?_ How can you even _ask_ that? I--fuck, Val. I'm so sorry."

Well, _that_ wasn't what Val was expecting. "Sorry?" she asked. "For _what?_ "

Nyma's head snapped up, and she stared at Val in open shock. "What do you mean, 'For what?' I _fucked up_ is what!"

"You didn't--" Oh.

_Oh._

"Oh," Val whispered. "The kiss?"

Nyma just stared at her, stone-faced, as though to ask if she was being deliberately obtuse. It was a prickly, defensive look Val knew well, and it said she was trying not to let on how close she was to a total break down.

Which... was fair. Val wasn't sure what her face had looked like when she and Nyma landed back in the Heart for that fraction of a second, but Val vanishing in an instant, back to Green, then off to the Holts... Well, she knew how that must have look to Nyma. Like she was hurt, and pissed, and didn't even want to look at Nyma in that moment.

That wasn't true, though.

She didn't think it was, anyway. She was... surprised, yes. Her stomach had given a funny little flip when Nyma kissed Rolo, but that could have just been Val losing her grip on the projection. After that, the snapback hit her, and it was enough to do a hard reset on her thought process. And now... Now she just felt queasy.

Sighing, Val stepped fully into the room, letting the door slide shut behind her. Nyma only had the bedside light on, and it cast a feeble glow across the room, draping Nyma in syrupy shadows and softening the tension hanging between them. Val hesitated a moment, then crossed to the bed and sat beside Nyma.

"So... We should probably talk, right?" Her heart was in her throat now, all the things she'd been not thinking about rising to the surface. Nyma, and Rolo, and everything they were to each other. There was fear mixed in with it all, yes, and a little bit of hurt, but the guilt and devastation in Nyma's eyes put the breaks on that, and Val tried not to let her mind run away with her just yet.

Nyma dropped her hands from her face, letting them dangle between her knees instead. "What is there to talk about? We were both there. It's not like I can say  _it wasn't what it looked like._ "

"I mean... Yeah," Val said. "But still--"

"What do you want from me, Val? We've been dating for almost a year, and I just kissed someone else in front of you. I'm sorry, okay? I know that's not good enough--I know I just fucked up this thing between us, which means it's a good _fucking_ thing you're in Green right now, because I'm sure the last thing you want is to share a brain with _me_ , and--"

"No." Val folded her hands to stop their shaking. (Fear, hope, hurt, fondness--all of them jumbled up and impossible to pick apart, but the one thing Val knew for sure was that she wasn't angry. Not even a little bit.) "Actually, I wouldn't mind sharing a brain right now. But that's not-- I don't want to take a short cut with this. I _do_ want to talk about it, though, because I'm not sure we're actually on the same page."

Nyma stared at her, mouth agape. "How can we not be on the same page? What _possible_ misunderstanding could there be here?"

"Well... For starters, you seem to think that I hate you."

The look on Nyma's face in that moment was almost enough to shatter Val. She looked so lost, so vulnerable. Her eyes filled up with tears, and she muttered a curse as she swiped at her eyes. Without thinking, Val reached out, catching her cheek. Nyma stilled at once, holding her breath as Val brushed a tear away with her thumb.

"Do you trust me?"

"Of course I do," Nyma whispered. "You _know_ I do."

Val smiled, dropping her hand from Nyma's face to take her hands instead. "Then let's talk. No assumptions, no lies, even if you're trying to spare my feelings, okay? I'll start." She paused, waiting for Nyma's nod, and then gathered herself. She'd always prided herself on having a way with words. Spoken or written, it made no difference. She'd never had trouble making herself understood.

Except for now, looking Nyma in the eyes in the darkness of her room. Val was tired to her very marrow, emotional enough that she caught herself tearing up before she'd even begun, but she laughed, wiping her cheek on her sleeve so she didn't have to let go of Nyma's hands.

Blowing out a breath, she began.

"I was... _Hell_ , Nyma, okay. It stings a little, you kissing Rolo. I wasn't expecting it, and maybe I'm feeling like a little bit of an idiot right now. I've always known how important Rolo is to you. He's _more_ than some old teammate of yours; I _know_ that. But you'd never talked about dating him or anything, and maybe I'm just blind, but I guess I just assumed you weren't into men."

"I'm not," Nyma said. She stopped short, then, and scrunched her face up. "Rolo's... different."

Val squeezed her hands, gently. "I know. And maybe I should have seen it coming, but I didn't. So when you kissed him, I thought-- He's _everything_ to you, and I _know_ that, and I realized that I could never live up to that."

Nyma sucked in a breath. " _What?_ Val, no--"

"Shh." Val leaned forward, pressing her forehead to Nyma's. "I know. It's--all of this is complicated, and I'm too tired and emotional to put it into words right, but that's exactly what I'm trying to say. If it hurt, it was because _I'm_ scared I'm not enough for you, not because of anything you did. You love Rolo. I know you do. I _have known_  you do, even if I thought it was a different sort of love. But, Nyma, _I love that about you._ " She swallowed around a lump in her throat, her voice cracking as her tears finally overwhelmed her tired defenses. "The part of me that's upset by this is the part of me that's afraid I'll never be able to make you happy the way Rolo makes you happy, that you don't love me as much as you love Rolo, which is _stupid._  That's not how it works." She paused, taking in Nyma's tear-streaked face. "You wouldn't be this upset if you didn't care. So... That's why I want to talk. To let _you_ talk. No assumptions, okay? Not from me, and not from you."

"You're too good for me," Nyma said, a lopsided smile breaking through her tears. She looked miserable, and she floundered a few times before she managed to continue. "I'm not good at this--at talking. No... At being _honest_. I've spent my whole life lying to everyone. Even myself."

"That's okay," Val said. "Take your time."

Nyma's mouth hung open for a long moment. Her hands shook, and she stared at their intertwined hands like she couldn't bring herself to look Val in the eye.

But she didn't let go.

"I never... There was never anything between me and Rolo. I wasn't into guys--not for anything serious. A fling here and there, maybe, but never a relationship. I've never really _been_ a relationship kind of person. You're only the second serious girlfriend I've ever had, okay? That should tell you something about how I feel. If you were just a rebound or whatever, it wouldn't be _like this._ It would be sex every now and again when I'm bored and as little in between as possible. That's how it was after Talla."

Val had already known that. She'd been in Nyma's head, they'd talked now and again when they were too tired for anything more than curling up together in a warm bed that didn't feel like _theirs_  just yet. But hearing Nyma say it, hearing the earnest strain in her voice, unlocked the vice around Val's chest. She sagged, her forehead still pressed to Nyma's, and blew out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

"But you do love Rolo," she said, hurrying on before Nyma could get defensive again. "I won't presume to tell you how, but you do love him. I've been able to see that from the start. Even if you're not _in love with_ him, he's... He matters. He makes you a better person."

"He does," Nyma admitted. "And... I think I could have loved him. If things were different, if I weren't so jaded--if I didn't have you..."

"Okay," Val said. Her heart was pounding now, for an entirely different reason. "So... is it fair to say you're in love with both of us, at least a little?"

Val could see the truth pulling at Nyma, but she held off, pulling back from Val, though she still didn't let go of her hands. "I love _you_ , Val. I'm _with_ you. I'd understand if you don't want to be with me after this, but I'm not going to leave you for Rolo."

That warmed Val, spreading through her chest like syrup and giving her the courage to ask the question that had been building in the back of her mind for... for a while now, if she was being completely honest. A question she'd been too afraid to ask, because it was the sort of question that might change everything just by being voiced. "What if you didn't have to? Leave me, I mean."

Nyma went still, suddenly more focused on Val than ever before. "What... What do you mean by that?" Her voice said she was searching for the trap, and Val breathed a laugh that was as much her own nerves as anything else.

"Exactly what I said. You love me--and I love _you_. But you also said that 'if things were different...'" Val shook her head. "I've always known that Rolo was important to you. I told you, Nyma, that's part of why I fell for you. You're different when you talk about him. When you remember him. It's not that I don't love the rest of you, but--Nyma--I would _never_  want you to lose the part of you that is the--the you-and-Rolo part of you. _Nyma._  I..." She had to stop again to breathe, because the tears were making her voice all wobbly, but now that she'd started, she wasn't going to stop for anything.

" _Nyma,_ " she said again, squeezing Nyma's hands at the same time. "There have been times that I've imagined us getting married, or at least staying together after the war, building a _life_  together. And I know I can't make that decision for the both of us; I'm not trying to. I just mean that, when I imagine our happy ending, it's never been 'you and me.' It's always been 'you, me, and Rolo.' _Always._ I may not have pictured it quite like this, but... I would never ask you to ditch Rolo for me. Fuck, Nyma, we've both been trying to bring him home for a year now! I know I don't really know him, but it kind of feels like I do, and... I don't know. He matters to me, too. I want you both to be happy, and I know this isn't a conversation we can finish today, not without Rolo, but--" She faltered again, her mouth dry and her hands shaking and her eyes unable to look away from Nyma's wide, violet stare. Flustered, she started to trip over her own words. "You're-- I don't want you to--to--you know--" She bit down on a hysterical scream, a wild laugh bubbling up to match it. "All I'm saying is--well... You have two hands, don't you?"

Nyma stared at her for a long moment, apparently speechless, and just when Val was about to discover if she could actually combust from embarrassment, Nyma fell against her, trying and failing to stifle her giggles.

"'I have _two hands_?'" she asked. " _Really?_ "

"It's an Earth thing," Val said, face flaming. "It just means... It doesn't have to be me _or_ Rolo. It doesn't have to be a competition. If you want to date us both, and if Rolo's okay with it... Well, we shouldn't take the option off the table just because it would scandalize half of my parents' generation."

Nyma laughed again, a little brighter and a little looser than before. "You're really okay with that?"

Val shrugged. "People are capable of loving more than one person, you know. Just look at Blue! Do you feel any less close to her because there are four of us instead of two? I don't."

"And if I decided to start gushing about Rolo for some reason... you'd be okay with that?"

"I mean, you kind of already do that, by your standards. Maybe it's not _gushing_ , exactly, but have you _seen_ your face when you talk about him?" Val brushed her thumb across Nyma's knuckles, a wry smile playing at her lips. "Actually, now that I think about it, I feel kind of stupid for not ever noticing you had feelings for the guy."

"I-- I never--"

Val kissed the tip of her nose. "It's okay. That's one of the things I love about you. So, to answer your question--yes. I'm okay with you talking about Rolo. Whether you're gushing, or if you're missing him, or if you're just _thinking_ about him and want to share. I'm more than just okay with that. I _want_ you to feel like you can come to me with anything."

"Okay," Nyma said. She sounded stunned, testing each step as she made it, wide violet eyes searching Val's face. "I know I'm not always the best at talking about shit, but I'll try." She trailed off, her voice going soft at the edges. "I love you, Val."

Val kissed her, the yawning exhaustion in her bones quieting as Nyma's hands found her waist and Val's rose to frame Nyma's face. "I love you, too," Val said, breaking the kiss but not moving away. "Is it okay if I crash here? Pidge and I are going to try to reach their dad, but I need some sleep if I'm going to be anything but useless."

"Of course," Nyma said. She brushed Val's hair out of her face, staring at her for a long moment as though trying to memorize her face, before finally standing to pull back the blankets. They crawled into bed together, Nyma curling around Val, cocooning her in warmth and softness, and Val smiled as the fatigue of the day finally caught up with her.


	10. Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Val and Nyma successfully bilocated to the cockpit of the Dark Blue Lion and had a teary reunion with Rolo. Upon returning to the castle-ship, Val raced to find the Holts to let them know the good news. Pidge was eager to try to find their dad, but Karen insisted Val get some rest first. She reluctantly agreed, but first had a conversation with Nyma about how, just before Val lost her grip on the astral projection, Nyma kissed Rolo.

Val felt more refreshed after five hours of sleep than she had any right to be. Nyma was exactly where she'd been when Val drifted off--pressed against her, one arm draped over Val's waist. Her breath stirred the hair on the back of Val's neck, and she shivered, a grin bursting across her face as she rolled over and pressed a kiss to Nyma's forehead.

Nyma grunted, her face scrunching up for a moment before she grudgingly opened her eyes.

"I'm going to go find the Holts now," Val whispered.

Nyma turned her face into the pillow with a grunt, but as Val slipped out of bed and headed for the door, she heard a muffled, "Good luck," thrown her way.

Smiling, she hurried back to her own room to change and brush her hair, then all but sprinted down to the rec room. The Holts were there waiting, just as they'd said they would be, and Shiro had joined them at some point. He lay on one side of the couch, curled around Matt, while Pidge and Karen were busy on their laptop and tablet, respectively, on the other side of the room. Val felt the change in the atmosphere the second she walked in.

"You ready for this?" she asked, catching Pidge's eye.

Pidge shut their laptop with a snap, tossing it onto the couch cushion beside them and standing. "More than ready. Where should we go? Green?"

There was a note of trepidation in their voice, and Val wondered if they'd even been to see Green since the night she’d found them having an emotional breakdown as they fled Green’s hangar. "Yeah," she said, careful to keep her tone neutral. "I think that's our best bet. We'll need both her and Blue to help us out, and I'll probably have an easier time finding Blue once we're in the astral realm."

Pidge's fingers caught the end of their sleeve and started to fiddle, but they nodded resolutely and headed for the door, not waiting for any of the others to join them. Val glanced at Matt and Karen, both of whom looked concerned, but Karen just shook her head when Val started to ask if Pidge was okay.

"We shouldn't keep them waiting," she said softly. "I think what they need most right now is to feel like they're doing something."

Val nodded, though she didn't believe that in the slightest. She'd seen Pidge huddled on the floor, a soul-deep ache radiating from them and Green both. Val hadn't told anyone about it, but she knew it was more than simple grief that had kept Pidge away from Green all this time. Guilt started to coalesce again in her gut, but Karen laid a hand on her shoulder as she passed, offering an understanding smile.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yeah," Val said. "You were probably right about me needing it."

Karen's eyes shone with amusement. "Perks of being a mother," she said.

Val elbowed her in the ribs. "And an adjunct?"

"And an adjunct."

The conversation tapered off as they headed out, Karen staring at nothing like her mind had hurried on ahead to keep Pidge company--which, honestly, was probably closer to the truth than it sounded. Matt had withdrawn into himself, hardly looking at any of the others, though he did lean into Shiro's touch when he started massaging Matt's shoulders.

Val stared at them all as the numbers ticked away on the elevator, carrying them toward answers that were long overdue. She'd been working on this problem for months now, coming at it from every angle, figuring out how it worked piece by piece, and she still felt like she was poking at ghosts. She knew in her head that this had every reason to work with Pidge and Sam the same way it had worked with Nyma and Rolo, but that didn't stop her feeling like it was going to turn out to be a dud, leaving her with three devastated Holts and a ball of lead in her gut the size of a watermelon.

When the elevator finally let them out in Green's hangar, Matt was the first to move, crossing to where Pidge had stopped, frozen about a dozen paces from the elevator. They stared up at Green, blank-faced, and jumped when Matt laid a hand on their shoulder. He said something in a whisper that didn't carry to Val, and Pidge scrubbed at their eyes before turning around and scowling at the three still lingering in the elevator door.

"Are we doing this or not?"

"We're doing this," Val said, channeling all her determination into the words. This was her plan, her magic, and if she wasn't confident in it, how could she ask anyone else to be?

Karen wrapped Pidge in a hug briefly, then stepped back, her hands on their shoulders. "You want us to wait out here?"

Pidge shrugged, a little too casually. "We'll probably need to concentrate on what we're doing..."

"Okay." Karen nodded, first to Pidge and then to Val. "Go on. We'll be here when you're finished."

They headed up the ramp into Green's cockpit, the air between them crackling all the while with anticipation. With _fear._ Val wanted to offer comfort, but Pidge had been so fragile these last few weeks, always just a step away from cracking. Sympathy, however well-meaning, was liable to set them off, and there was no telling which way they'd fall apart when they did. They might pick a fight just as easily as break down in tears.

There were still two seats in the cockpit, as there had always been, and Val slowed for a moment to see which Pidge would pick. The pilot's seat had always been theirs, but it might be too sharp a reminder of the decisions they'd come to regret. Then again, taking Ryner's old seat probably wouldn't be much better.

After a moment's hesitation, Pidge took Ryner's seat, perching on the very edge like they were afraid to touch it. The deference hit Val like a knife to the chest--Pidge, of all people, shouldn't look so out of place inside their own cockpit.

She didn't say anything, though. Now wasn't the time for that sort of introspection, and anyway, successfully getting in touch with Sam was bound to be more helpful for Pidge's emotional state than anything Val could offer.

"All right," Val said, claiming the pilot's seat as though she hadn't noticed Pidge's hesitation. It was too quiet in here, the ghosts of the past crowding around them and stopping the words in Val's throat. She swallowed, then rested her hands on the controls and leaned back. "We're going to have to dive into the bond a little bit, then pass through into the Heart. We'll need to keep hold of each other while we do, because I might end up trying to go to deeper into Blue's Heart than Green's. More practice and all. I should still be able to find you even if we get separated, but it'll be easier if we can go in together."

Pidge nodded and slowly settled back into their seat, their hands curling around the armrests. Val closed her eyes, reaching out to Green, and through Green, to Pidge. They'd never done this before, and it was awkward to do so now. Despite several weeks of building a relationship with Green, Val still felt a little bit like an outsider here--and that wasn't even mentioning the walls Pidge had up. Walls that Val steered well clear of for a long while before tightening her grip on her controls.

 _You're never going to get there like this,_ she told herself. _You need to be inside their head. They_ know _that._

It didn't make it feel any less like an invasion of privacy.

Before Val could prod at Pidge's mental walls, though, Pidge themself heaved a sigh. "Sorry," they said. "I'm a little rusty at this."

Val turned. "It's okay. We're blazing trails here. It's bound to be a little tricky at first." She paused, drumming her fingers on the controls. "Just to make sure we're on the same page here--I'm focusing on my bond with Green... such as it is. I figure she's going to help make a bridge between us, instead of us trying to connect on our own. Does that sound right to you?"

"Yeah..."

"Something wrong?"

Pidge pursed their lips. "Nothing. Just... having a little trouble connecting with Green."

"Ah. Anything I can do to help, or should I just let you focus?"

Pidge didn't answer for nearly a minute, and Val held her tongue during that time, doing her best to let her mind diffuse through the bond. It took more concentration to maintain than it would have with Blue--she didn't need to actively hold onto it like she had at first, but if she let her mind wander too much, things started to go out of focus.

Eventually, Pidge shifted. "Could... Maybe we could try switching seats?"

"Of course." Val stood even as she spoke, all but dancing out of Pidge's way and dropping into Ryner's old spot while Pidge shuffled to the pilot's seat. They looked like they were about to enter a coliseum rather than sit in a seat they'd occupied hundreds of times before, and Val held her breath, afraid if she spoke she would scare Pidge off.

The change, when they finally sat, was almost instantaneous. Green purred, her desperate fondness so strong Val felt it in the pit of her stomach. She'd missed Pidge, missed them sorely, and Val suspected Pidge had missed this, too. They caught each other up in guilt and grief, and Pidge fell back into their chair like it was made for them.

The Lions being what they were, maybe it _was_.

Pidge's eyes closed, and they breathed deeply several times, hovering on the edge of tears, but their presence in the bond reached out cautiously for Val, a hand outstretched in invitation. Val took it, conscious of the trust implicit in the gesture, and sucked in a breath as her mind intertwined with Pidge's.

They had only a moment to reel from the sudden amplification of their emotions--Pidge's pain crashing over Val like a wave, the awkwardness in the air between them curdling like old milk. The force of it actually untethered them, pulling them out of themselves and into the bond. Val floundered for a moment, disoriented in a sea of raw emotion, but Green wove a net around them, keeping them contained within the safety of her will, and pulled them deeper.

They landed on the shore of a familiar river, Val standing ankle-deep in the water, Pidge just above her on the bank. The dappled sunlight coming through the branches was familiar to both of them, as were the bird calls Val could, for once, hear with perfect clarity. (It was hard to focus on things like that when you were busy getting swept away by the current.)

"Well... We made it." Pidge glanced around them, shying away from the forest like it was a monster out to get them, and Val once again had the urge to reach out and pull them into a hug. It was the same impulse she'd had with Luz and Mateo after Lance's disappearance. She just wanted to protect them from the world and to make their hurt go away. It only took one look at Pidge to know that it wouldn't be appreciated, though. "What do we have to do now?"

Val climbed up the river bank to Pidge, shaking the water from her shoes as she went. As with everything in the astral realm, it listened to her intent just a little too well, the moisture wicking away surprisingly quickly. By the time she straightened up, it was like she hadn't just been standing in the water at all.

"We'll need to go to Blue's Heart," Val said. "There's a tower there that helps me get places... It's complicated."

"Everything about Quintessence is complicated," Pidge said. "As long as it gets me to my dad, I don't even care."

Val nodded, holding out her hand. "I've gotten pretty good at moving people around the astral realm, but it's a good idea to keep hold of each other, just in case."

Pidge cautiously took Val's hand, though they suddenly looked wary about this entire endeavor. "Just in case what?"

"You know, I'm not actually sure. There's a hell of a lot to the astral plane beyond the Lions' Hearts, and I'm not really sure how much of it I can access, intentionally or otherwise. I'd rather play it safe than lose you in an interdimensional void somewhere."

" _What?"_ "

Pidge's squawk bristled with alarm, but Val had already fixed her mind on the island at the Heart of Voltron. She squeezed Pidge's hand once in reassurance, then whisked them both away. It was, as always, an instantaneous trip, so Pidge was still winding up to a protest by the time they arrived on a cliff overlooking the placid blue sea. It was sunny on the island today, birds singing in the warmth of a summer afternoon. Val wondered if that had to do with Blue's paladins' moods. It probably did, at least indirectly. Nyma had finally gotten to see Rolo again, and her conversation with Val last night had put them both at ease. That probably made Blue happy, too. Thus, a perfectly serene, almost idyllic island.

Pidge stopped, their mouth hanging open, and blinked at the new scenery. After a moment, they turned to glower at Val, who shrugged. "Sorry," she said, though she wasn't really. "Didn't want to waste any more time. This way!"

She led them up the short, well-worn path to the lighthouse-tower. It looked less like a lighthouse today and more like the tall, smooth white spire that had taken them to Oriande so long ago. She'd never figured out why it changed appearance like this, or what it meant. It seemed to work as an amplifier for her bilocation no matter its form, which was all that really mattered. It was curious was all.

"Okay," Val said, turning around and walking backwards toward the tower as she laid it out for Pidge. "When you're ready, we'll put our hands on the tower, one over the other. It'll loop us into Blue's Quintessence and sort of... slingshot us to where we want to go. First, though, you need to focus on your dad. The barriers between us are pretty low here, so I'll be able to draw on your familiarity to orient us. I think Nyma focused on a specific memory of Rolo, and that seemed to work pretty well. Something that defines your relationship. Something that sets him apart from anyone else in the universe."

"I'm ready," Pidge said at once.

Val blinked, but she didn't press the issue. It had been pretty quick for Nyma, too, and Pidge had let themself fixate on their dad over the last year in a way Nyma had never let herself fixate on Rolo. So, nodding, she led Pidge to the tower and gestured for them to press their hand to the stone. Once they had, Val covered it with her own and closed her eyes.

She didn't bother trying to visualize Pidge's memories, as she had at first with Nyma. Instead, she studied the shape of their thoughts. The currents of their emotion. She let the feeling sink in, let it resonate in her chest, down her arm, and into the tower.

Between one breath and the next, she felt it resonate elsewhere in the universe.

When she opened her eyes, she was in a cockpit much like the one where she and Nyma had found Rolo. It was dark, and though Val couldn't feel the prickling at the back of her neck she'd felt in Dark Blue, she felt something similar here. And oppressive presence in the air all around--dormant for now, but never far away. The view out the viewscreen was of open space, a few planetoids just visible against the backdrop of stars.

Pidge's breath left them in a rush, and Val turned away from the view to find them frozen in the middle of the cockpit, staring at the back wall, where Sam Holt was prodding at a panel, muttering to himself. He went fuzzy around the edges, shimmering and transparent as Rolo had been, and a glance at the pilot's seat confirmed that his body was there, just as uncannily still as Rolo's had been, like a robot waiting for a command.

"Dad."

The word was hardly more than a whisper, falling from Pidge's lips like a prayer, but it made Sam freeze, his hand visibly shaking where it had stopped, hovering over a control panel at waist height. He breathed, shaky and shallow, and crumpled, his head dropping as his shoulders hiked up toward his ears. He leaned heavily against the wall, and Val could see his internal battle.

It lasted only a few seconds before he turned to face them.

" _Pidge._ "

* * *

Pidge stood frozen on the edge of falling, the word suspended around them. Their father stood a scant ten feet away, heartbreak on his face. He'd sounded inches from shattering when he said their name, but he'd stopped himself after taking only a single step forward. One hand started to reach for them, but he snatched it back, staring like he expected them to vanish at any moment.

"Pidge," he said again, his voice cracking. "You're-- You're okay. You're all right. I thought..."

A thousand unspoken things filled the silence that followed, Ryner's death foremost among them. Even after they'd searched so long, so desperately, to find their father, there was still a corner of their mind that saw him and quailed. He'd killed Ryner. He'd tried to kill them, too.

At least he wasn't wearing the armor of Zarkon's paladins. Pidge thought they might have broken if he had been. It would have been too much, too similar to what he'd been the last time they saw him.

Instead, he wore his old Garrison uniform, its crisp gray lines and neat medals starkly out of place in the sickly purple glow of the cockpit. Looking at him, Pidge felt ten years old again, awed and envious of the Garrison as they came for a visit with their mother. Matt had still been a cadet then, and Pidge had wanted nothing more than to join him, to learn all there was to know and to see the solar system for themself.

Tears built up in the corner of their eyes, but they remained locked in place, every cell in their body caught between fear and longing. They wanted to throw themself at their dad and pretend that everything was back to how it should be.

They wanted to run away and hide before they found that there was nothing left of their dad to save, after all.

His face crumpled in the next moment, tears welling up in his eyes. He blinked furiously, and seemed to only barely be holding them at bay. "Pidge," he whispered. "I'm so... _so_ sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen. I just... I couldn't..."

Pidge had never seen their dad cry before. Not from joy, not from grief, not from frustration or even from pain. He wasn't a stoic man, by any means, but he _was_ persistently cheerful, optimistic almost as a point of pride. He didn't cry because, in almost every case, he'd rather find something to laugh at.

So the sight of him like this reached deep into Pidge's chest and twisted, rattling them to the bone. This wasn't the hollow soldier they'd halfway expected to find. Nor was it the too-perfect recreation of everything they'd loved about their dad as Haggar tried to lure them into yet another trap.

This was their _dad_ , raw and hurting from the hell Haggar had put him through.

This was _real._

Pidge was running before they'd consciously reached a decision, sprinting across the cockpit and flinging themself at their dad. They remembered too late that they weren't actually here, and their heart fell as they realized they were probably just going to end up running straight through him.

They didn't.

It was an awkward, jarring collision, neither of them prepared for it. Pidge's teeth clacked together as they tripped over their own feet, falling hard against their dad and latching on to the sleeves of his uniform. He stumbled, freezing for just an instant before wrapping his arms around them and squeezing. Pidge didn't think they had to breathe in this form. They didn't have a physical body, after all. They still felt a slight burn in their lungs as their dad's arms squeezed the air out of them.

Or maybe that was just the tide of emotions fighting to come out on top.

"Pidge," their dad said, soft and reverent, like he still couldn't make himself believe that they were really here. "Oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault," they said, their voice rough. "Blame Haggar." There was more they wanted to say-- _so_ much more. About the master key device, about the robeasts. Pidge didn't know everything there was to know about Vindication, not by a long shot, but they knew enough to know their dad was just a victim in all this. But their throat had already closed up, and so they just shook their head, clinging more tightly to him. "I missed you so much."

"I miss you, too. All of you, every day." He kissed the top of their head, then pulled back enough to see their face. "When did you get so tall?"

Pidge laughed, the thin sound more of a hiccup than anything. The weight of two years settled on their shoulders, pressed on their lungs, made them want to melt into their dad and never move. It had been _so long_ since they'd last seen him. So much had happened, and they didn't even know where to begin.

"Never mind that," he said, smiling softly. "What are you doing here? _How_ are you here?"

" _Here_ -here, or like... in space?" they asked. "Because one of those is a _really_ long story."

His smile grew, crinkling the corners of his eyes. "Oh, believe me, I can imagine. Rolo and Rax have filled me in on some of it. Paladin of Voltron, right?"

They flushed, suddenly self-conscious. They were keenly aware of Val's presence, and that she knew how much Pidge had been running away from everything since Ryner's death. They hadn't meant to let it go on this long. They'd only wanted to take some time to get their head on straight, but every time they thought of going back into battle, they started hyperventilating, obsessing over every wrong choice that had led to Ryner's death. Even just sitting in Green's cockpit today had almost induced a panic attack, and that had nothing to do with the paladins' usual business.

"I mean... Sort of? Things are messy right now." They paused, staring at the medals on their dad's uniform. They looked so real, incredibly detailed and polished to a shine, despite the fact that none of this was real. Was it Pidge's mind creating this illusion, or their dad's? "Are you mad?"

"How could I be?" he asked. "I wish it hadn't come to this. I _wish_ you could have stayed safe on Earth instead of having to be out here risking your life. I wish I could take your place. But since that's not the way things worked out... No. I'm not mad at you. I'm _proud_ , Pidge. You've saved so many people. So many more than I know about, I'm sure." He brushed their hair back, smiling, and Pidge realized he meant every word.

They wondered if he'd be half as proud as he knew they'd gotten scared and shoved all their responsibilities off on Val.

His expression dimmed, and he let his hand drop to their shoulder. "But that's beside the point. How are you here? How are you... like _this?_ "

"You can thank Val for that," Pidge said, gesturing to the side. Val waved awkwardly, lingering near the front of the cockpit. She probably wanted to give them privacy, but the nature of bilocation made that tricky, even if the cockpit had been big enough for it. "She... Well, I've been trying to understand it for months, and it still feels too much like magic for me, but she brought us here. The Lions helped."

"I found Rolo yesterday," Val put in. "Today? I honestly have no idea what time it is right now. He seems... tense."

Pidge's dad sighed. "Yeah. We're not sure how long we'll be out this time, or when we'll see each other again. I know he was worried about it. About Zuza, too."

Pidge's grip on his arm tightened, stopping him in his tracks. "What about Zuza?"

He frowned. "Right, Zuza said she'd come from the castle. You know her?"

"Yeah. She _is_ part of Vindication now? We weren't sure. Luz is the one Haggar really wanted, so I didn't know if..."

"That could explain why they're moving slower with her." He sighed, bowing his head. "I don't want you to have to worry, Pidge, but you need to be prepared. They've already connected me, Rolo, and Rax to these lions, and I think Zarkon's new Black Lion has been functional even longer than that. If Haggar wanted this Luz, then she must have been the one she planned to connect to Red. The druids don't think Zuza's up to the task, but if they don't find someone better, I'm afraid they'll use her anyway."

"Dark Voltron," Pidge whispered. It had been a specter hanging over them all since they first caught sight of Dark Green, but they'd never really believed it was possible. Zarkon had built false lions, and they were powerful--the culmination of Haggar's experimentation with robeasts, easily a match for the actual Voltron Lions. But bringing them all together into something like Voltron was another matter entirely. Pidge had hoped to stop Zarkon before it came to that point.

Pidge's dad sighed. "So you know about that."

"Some," Pidge said. "Enough to know we can't let it come to that. We need to figure out how to stop this. How much do you know about how this all works?"

A smile tugged at his lips, and he gestured for Pidge to follow him to the front of the cockpit. "Pidge, I've had _months_ to gather information, and better access than the druids would believe possible. All I've needed is a chance to put it all to use."

* * *

The minutes crept by, gathering beneath Matt's skin until he felt like his body was two sizes too small. Shiro's back rubs had mitigated the discomfort for a while, but there was only so much either of them could do for distraction. The Green Lion stood before them, a silent behemoth shielding whatever was going on inside from the captive audience out here. Matt's mother had taken over the computer terminal set into the wall nearby and was distracting herself with... Matt wasn't sure actually. More adoption law? Or something for Coran, maybe? Something more productive than Matt's chewing on his fingernails and Shiro's increasingly uncoordinated back rubs.

He was probably just as lost in thought as Matt was, spinning constant circles through best- and worst-case scenarios. It didn’t matter what Rolo had told Nyma and Val; Matt wouldn’t believe it until Pidge saw their dad for themself.

It was a Schrodinger's Cat situation in the worst way. Matt's dad was the cat in the box with a vial of poison, and had been left to live or die unobserved by the people stuck on the castle-ship. Pidge had just cracked open the box, to find out their dad was long since crushed beneath Haggar's experimentation--or was alive and well. They might even now be plotting how to bring him home.

Until they walked out of that cockpit, Matt had no way to know.

So he waited, chewing on his nails and leaning into Shiro's touch, sick to his stomach and desperately, helplessly hopeful for the answer they all wanted to hear. He'd counted the seconds, checked the clock twenty-odd times in the thirty minutes this had been going on, and he kept seeing movement where there was none.

When Green finally did shift, though, it caught him off guard. He jumped, and Shiro's hands tightened on his shoulders. His heart, which had quieted a few times over the long wait, kicked up a new fuss in his chest, pounding out a frantic beat as he started forward, stopped, and backed up against Shiro.

He didn't want to know.

He wanted so badly to hear one single piece of good news, but he _didn't want to know_. He didn't want to have his worst fears confirmed.

He didn't want to have to kill his dad.

Matt's mother turned away from the computer at once, clapping her hands over her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears, and Matt couldn't tell if they were the good kind or not. He realized, with a sickening lurch, that she knew. One way or another, she knew. He didn't know if she'd known as soon as Pidge did, or only now that they were back--adjunct stuff had always confused him, and his mother's eerie insight more than the rest.

He opened his mouth to ask her what had happened, to rip the band-aid off, but the words stuck in his throat. Before he could force them out, Green's ramp hit the hangar floor, yanking Matt's attention back that way.

Pidge came barreling out of the lion, sprinting full tilt across the hanger and flinging themself at Matt. They hit like a freight train, and Matt staggered back against Shiro, his hands coming up belatedly to catch Pidge’s shoulders.

"He's okay," they said while Matt was still reeling. He froze, and felt Shiro freeze behind him. Pidge choked on a laugh, the sound more than a little teary, and squeezed Matt around the middle. They were shaking, and Matt hugged them close to try to stop it, an instinctive impulse that happened independent of his mind’s attempts to process what they'd just said.

"He's-- He is?" Matt breathed.

Pidge nodded, their face pressed to his chest. "He's okay. He's-- I mean, he's not _great_ , but he's way better than I expected. He's... _Fuck_. I have so much to tell you." They pulled away, scrubbing at their face, and though there were tears dripping from their chin, now that they weren't a blur, Matt could see the grin stretched across their face. They grabbed his hand and towed him toward the elevator. "Come on. Mind meld."

Val appeared at the top of the ramp just then, moving more slowly. She looked twice as exhausted as she had last night when she'd come to find them and tell them about her discovery. That would probably be because she'd just flung herself and a passenger across the universe twice in the span of twenty-four hours.

Pidge stopped short at the sight of her, then left Matt behind to go meet Val at the bottom of the ramp with a hug that left Val wheezing. " _Thank you._ "

Val blinked, one hand settling atop Pidge's hair. "You don't need to thank me, Pidge. Come on. We're all family here. I'm just sorry I couldn't give you more time."

Shaking their head, Pidge squeezed tighter. "You gave me plenty. Besides, now we know this is always an option if we need to see him again."

Matt's mother reached the two of them just as Pidge finally gave up their hold on her, and Val was quickly smothered in another hug. Whatever Matt's mom said to Val, it made her tear up, though Matt couldn't make it out from where he was. He wanted to go and add his thanks to his family's, but he couldn't seem to remember how to walk.

His dad was alive.

His dad was actually--

Shiro wrapped his arms around Matt's shoulders, pulling him close.

"Shiro," Matt whispered, his voice cracking.

"I know."

He did, probably. They'd been taken by the Empire--all three of them, terrified and completely unprepared. Matt didn't think any of them had expected to make it out alive, or to see the others again. That Matt and Shiro had both escaped, and had found each other, was lucky enough. If they actually got Matt's dad back, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

Val smiled as she pulled back, wiping her eyes with the back of her had. "Okay," she said in a warbling voice. "Well, I'll leave you to it, then. I think I'm going to go take another nap."

"You deserve it," Matt's mom said.

Matt smiled at Val as she left, hoping the expression conveyed his gratitude. He'd have to find her later, thank her properly.

Right now, he just wanted to get to the training deck. Pidge had mentioned the mind meld, and that was all Matt could think about. He could see his dad again. He could hear his voice.

He was grateful beyond words when Pidge grabbed him by the hand and started off again, towing him toward the elevator with an infectious energy lending a spring to their step.

* * *

"They spent the longest on my lion," Sam was saying, the image of him dancing before Matt's eyes as he led Pidge around the cockpit of Dark Green, pointing out weaknesses they could exploit. "I get the sense that the others were rushed. If anything, they'll be easier to bring down than this one."

The mind meld was such that Matt could almost believe he was there with the other two, a silent companion to Sam’s whirlwind tour of the robeast he'd been linked to. Almost, except that he was still distantly aware of the training deck around him--of Shiro at his side, shaking, a tear falling now and again from his cheek onto their intertwined hands; of Karen, leaning forward like she could step into the memory if she just wanted it enough; of Pidge, their fingers flying across their keyboard as they transcribed every word Sam had said.

It would be useful; Matt knew it would be. Sam had lived through the experiments, and he'd watched as they were repeated on Rolo and Rax. He'd been there when Dark Green was launched, when the druids first seized control of his body to use as their paladin. They'd shielded both the lion and the master key against Sam's influence, but he could still sense them, somewhat. He knew how his lion worked, and how to bring it down, and he'd taken advantage of this opportunity to share that knowledge with someone who could make use of it.

And Matt could hardly bring himself to care about any of it. His dad was right there in front of him, alive and well, attentive and analytical like he'd always been. Two years he'd suffered at the hands of the Empire, but he still found ways to fight back. He still watched and waited, and trusted that it would work out in the end.

All too soon, the Val of the memory cleared her throat.

"Pidge," she said, the sound clearly torn from her throat. Pidge turned toward her, and Matt's view shifted with theirs. One glance said it all: Val was shaking, her brow furrowed and her arms crossed over her chest like she was trying to hold something in. Her eyes were sad as she smiled at Pidge. "I'm sorry... I'm not going to be able to hold this much longer."

Sam stepped forward, crossing six feet in a single step, concern sweeping over his face. "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah." Pidge nodded to Val, then turned and flung their arms around Sam's waist. "Just--it takes a lot for Val to keep us here. We'll be back soon, Dad, I promise, I--" They breathed in, a shaky sound, and shook their head against his chest. "We're not giving up on you. Me, Mom, Matt and Shiro--"

Sam’s breath caught. “Karen? You’re mother’s with you?”

Pidge nodded, pulling back. “It’s… There’s so much I have to tell you. But, yeah. We went back to Earth, and Mom came with us when we left. We’re all looking for you.”

Sam smiled, blinking furiously. "I know. Tell your mother I love her. I love her more than life itself, and not a day goes by that I don't think about her." Karen's sob split the hush over the training deck, and Matt's chest constricted. He squeezed Shiro's hand--all the more when he heard his own name. "Matt... Tell Matt I'm proud of him. So, _so_ proud--of both of you. Of everything you've done. Of taking care of each other. And tell Shiro thank you for me. Rolo told me what he did, taking Matt's place in the Arena. He didn't deserve that. He didn't deserve any of it, but he kept Matt safe, and I'll never forget that."

Shiro was trembling by this point, his free hand pressed over his mouth, his eyes riveted to the scene playing out before them. Matt leaned into him, pulling his hand up to kiss--and well aware that he was in no better shape.

"I'll tell them," Pidge said, squeezing tighter as the scene around them turned hazy. "I love you, Dad."

"I love you, too, kiddo. I'll see you soon."

The cockpit dissolved to a cliffside scene, which soon faded entirely as the memory ended. Pidge blinked, and the memory skipped back, freezing with Pidge standing near the viewscreen at the front of the cockpit, their gaze passing over the starscape beyond as they turned to follow their dad’s progress around the lion. They clicked a button on the side of their headset, then tugged it off and tossed it aside, hardly pausing in their typing. Their cheeks were streaked with tears, but they hardly seemed to notice. For a long moment, no one moved. No one said so much as a word. Matt didn't think he could have, even if he'd had something worth saying. _Seeing_ his dad had left him breathless and trembling. Hearing him talk, hearing the messages he'd asked Pidge to pass on--

It was too much to process all at once like this. So Matt just sat there, holding Shiro's hand. He wasn't sure which of them was squeezing tighter, but he wouldn't be surprised if they both had bruises after all this.

It was just--

It was his _Dad._

Matt had forgotten the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the rhythm of his lectures and the way he talked with his hands when he was trying to explain things. Little things, incidental things, things Matt had never stopped to catalog before because they were so inconsequential but which hit him now with more than their due force. He shouldn't be tearing up because his dad had flicked Dark Green's instrument panel the way he flicked an engine that was malfunctioning or a computer screen that wasn't showing the readings he wanted to see.

Pidge shut their laptop, the snap of it loud in the silent room.

"We're getting him back."

Their voice left no room for argument, and their eyes blazed with a defiance Matt hadn't seen in them since Ryner's death. Matt nodded, and Shiro reached out to place a hand on Pidge's shoulder, and Karen wiped her tears away.

"We are. No matter what it takes."

Pidge smiled, then scrambled up and crossed to the comms terminal by the door. “Coran,” they said. “I just sent you an image capture from the mind meld. Can you cross-reference it with the stellar database? Dad thinks they sent him to an inhabited system so he’d be in position to attack. If we can find matching constellations in the archives--”

“We’ll find Dad,” Matt finished, the breath he’d only just recovered fleeing him again. Pidge turned, their eyes shining bright, and nodded.

“We’ll find him.”

* * *

Pidge was with Matt when they got the results. The constellations from Pidge’s memory matched the night sky as seen from orbit around the planet Quinekka. The locals had yet to issue a distress call of any sort, and there was no confirmed Imperial presence in the area, but it was a lead, and enough of one that not a single person objected to going. They didn't have a plan, didn't even really have much of a direction on how to deal with Dark Green without hurting Pidge's dad, but they were all in agreement that they had to do _something_ \--for Quinekka's sake as well as Sam's.

Matt squeezed Pidge's shoulder and offered them a smile as he stood, abandoning the blueprints he’d been studying in an instant. "I'll be back," he said. "Don't worry."

Pidge was already halfway out of their seat, but they froze, locking up as Matt sprinted out the door.

He expected them to stay here.

Okay, so that was a fair assumption, considering Pidge had sat out every mission since Ryner died. It didn't have any right to sting as much as it did, and Pidge shouldn't have been left feeling gutted just because Matt was trying to respect their decision.

But it _did_ sting.

This wasn't right.

This wasn't what they wanted--sitting on the sidelines while everyone else risked their lives. Burying their head in the sand and _hoping_ it all worked out okay.

No. They needed to be out there. They needed to help.

They were out the door before they could think better of it, sprinting for the prep room and arriving just as Hunk and Shay headed out the far door. Pidge shucked off their hoodie, shirt, and pants, and had their undersuit on in ten seconds flat, stopping with their breastplate hanging off them at an odd angle when they realized that it wouldn't do them any good to get suited up if Val took Green and left without them.

Cursing, they shoved their armor back into its tube--they'd finish in Green's hangar--and sprinted out of the prep room in their undersuit, the material making them slide as they careened around the first corner. They fumbled with their comm, nearly dropping it, and tuned it to Val's private frequency.

"Val!"

"Pidge?"

"Where are you?"

They could hear the frown in her voice. "I'm... in Green's hangar?"

Pidge breathed out a sigh. "Good. Just--don't take off yet."

"Pidge?"

But Pidge just switched off the comm and doubled down on sprinting. They weren't going to explain this over the comms. They weren't going to _explain_ it at all, if they could help it. They just had to get there, and then...

Well, they'd figure it out from there.

Val was waiting at the base of Green's ramp when Pidge barreled out of the elevator, wheezing and shaking--from the run, not from--

"Pidge!" Val hurried forward, catching Pidge by the arm and steadying them. Her eyes were wide, darting down to Pidge's black undersuit before returning to their face. "You..."

"I need to be out there," they said, the words falling out of them in a rush. "I can't-- _Val._ "

She gave their arm a squeeze. "Don't hate me for this, but are you _sure?_ I don't want you to rush yourself."

Pidge shook their head. They weren't sure, but they weren't about to admit that. "Dad's out there."

Val's face softened, and she nodded, like that was all the more Pidge had to say. Maybe it was. Val understood family--the whole reason she'd gotten caught up in this war was because she was trying to find Lance, and even after she'd been captured, she'd kept pushing just for the chance to learn something more.

"Is it cool if I still--"

Val didn't even finish her question, just stopped with her thumb hooked over her shoulder toward the Green Lion. Pidge wasn't sure what their face looked like, but they had a feeling that was what had stopped Val in her tracks. Pidge just-- They hadn't thought that far ahead, hadn't thought that getting back into it meant that Val didn't need to fill in anymore. She could go back to Blue, back to her copaladins, back to where she really wanted to be.

Val caught them by the shoulders just as they started to hyperventilate. "Hey. Pidge. You're okay. I'm not going anywhere, all right?"

They took a step back, not enough to break contact, just chasing the breath that evaded them. "You don't have to do this."

"Neither do you," Val said. She smiled. "I'm here for you, Pidge. For as long as you need me. Okay?"

Pidge nodded, numb.

"Okay. Go get the rest of your armor on. I'll be waiting inside."

Pidge was glad for the moment of privacy as they scrambled into their armor, breathing through their teeth and blinking away tears. Maybe they weren't ready for this. Maybe they never would be.

But they were done hiding.

* * *

The Dark Green Lion was already in motion when they arrived. Maybe Pidge and Val had happened to time their visit for just before Haggar launched the attack; maybe she’d seen the paladins approaching and had decided the best defense was to force the paladins to divide their attention between Dark Green and the civilians she was slaughtering.

Scars from laserfire and swaths of leveled structures dotted the planet below. The streets were deserted, but the sky was filled with swarming fighters desperately trying to bring Dark Green down. Pidge's heart pounded, their panic shrouded in cotton as it hovered in the space between them and Val. She sat in Ryner's seat, just to Pidge's right, watching the scanners, gathering information, feeding it to Pidge, who couldn't focus on anything except Green's rumbling purr in the air around them and the distant shadow that was Dark Green.

"About time!" Lance called over the comms, his voice strident. "What took so long?"

"Sorry," Val said, her mind reaching out to Pidge with a silent question. "I was..."

"This one's on me, Lance," they said, leaning forward and giving Green more speed. They blasted past the other lions, ignoring the overlapping voices calling out their name in surprise, or joy, or concern. They knew there was no way of making this not a big deal, but... they didn't want it to be a big deal. _So_ they'd spiraled out of control after Ryner died. They were back now, and they could pick up where they'd left off.

Val caught the direction of their thoughts and soothed them with the mental equivalent of a hand on their shoulder. It was a fleeting impulse, there long enough to quiet the raging of Pidge's thoughts, and then Val leaned into the chase right alongside them. Dark Green loomed large in their viewscreen for an instant before they slammed into her. The laser blast she'd been charging flew wide of its target, a squadron of local defense fighters, and she scrambled to right herself, roaring in outrage.

Pidge smiled, savage and defiant. "You wanna dance? Let's _dance._ "

It was Val who pulled the trigger on one of Green's modded cannons, but Pidge felt a thrill of vindictive pleasure just the same as a bubbling green blast exploded in Dark Green's face, coating her eyes in a corrosive paste. This had been one of Sam's ideas--as far as he could tell Dark Green's senses were limited, at best, and she relied on her pilot's view of the battle for most of the fine details. Pidge hadn't been thinking about _this_ , exactly, when they'd designed the acid cannon, but it did the job. Dark Green thrashed, firing off laser after laser at random, her mouth open in a silent roar. A spark ignited deep in her throat, and Pidge kicked off, clearing the blast radius an instant before Dark Green discharged her LOKI. A few local fighters got caught up in the electrical storm, spiraling toward the city below. Yellow caught them and raced toward the outskirts in search of somewhere safe to let them down while Pidge and Val regrouped with the others.

"Pidge." Matt sounded breathless, his voice wavering just above the level of a whisper. "You're..."

"I'm back," they said, because they knew everyone had to be thinking the same thing, and if one more person asked if they were up for this, if they were okay, if they were _sure_ , they might just blow a gasket. "That's Dad in there. I'm not just gonna let Haggar use him as her puppet without doing anything about it."

There was a warning in their voice, one the entire team probably recognized, but Matt knew them better than anyone. He would hear the warning, and he would see the fear underneath--but he must have known there was no point talking them out of this, because all he did was nod.

"What's the play?"

"Protect the city," Shiro said at once. "That's the number one priority--for the locals' sake as well as Sam's. He doesn't want to see these people hurt any more than we do."

"And Dark Green can take a hit," Pidge added, clenching their fists around the controls. "It took everything I had to disable her last time we fought. As long as you aren't concentrating all your fire on the cockpit, there's not much chance of hurting my dad."

Pidge was well aware that that wasn't much reassurance to anyone. They would all be holding back, just as Pidge had been holding back when they chased their dad through the abandoned Imperial base. No one wanted to hurt him. No one wanted to risk it. They would all be holding back now, no matter what Pidge said, but that was just as well. They had five lions here now, Voltron if they needed it. Even holding back, Dark Green wasn't going to come out on top.

Pidge led the charge, the Red Lion close on their tail, and caught Dark Green's attention with a laser to the back and a glancing blow from Green's claws as she skimmed over Dark Green's head. There hadn't been time to dig deep on the weaknesses Sam had pointed out, but Pidge remembered the gist of it, and Matt seemed to have internalized some of it, too. They aimed for the back of the head, for the finnicky joint where the hind legs met the body. They weren't the flashing red weak points of video game bosses, but Dark Green jerked with each hit, growing more frantic as Green and Red pressed their advantage.

But those weak points weren't enough on their own. They had the upper hand, but they still needed to disable this thing, and do it in a way that wouldn't destroy it completely.

"We did some scans on that thing," they said, twirling away from Dark Green's retaliation. "It looks like they made it out of a Weblum, somehow. Can we use that?" The more they flew, the easier it was to relax into the bond--it still hurt; they could still feel Ryner's absence keenly, like a hole had been torn in their armor, leaving their skin exposed to the chill air of the cockpit. But with Val here, there weren't so many pitfalls to avoid. The cavities were still there, but Val was a bridge built over the largest of them, a safety net to catch Pidge if they started to fall in. They leaned into her presence just to assure themself that she could support the weight of their factured mind, and breathed out a steadying sigh.

"Depends," Hunk said, grunting as Shay dove to intercept Dark Green's next attack, smacking her with Yellow's hindquarters for good measure. "How much of the Weblum is still in there? Does it think the same as a Weblum would?"

"Sure doesn't seem like it," Meri muttered. "Welbum are dangerous, but they don't go around attacking populated planets for no good reason."

"Haggar's controlling it, just as she's controlling Sam." Allura's voice was calm, almost startlingly so when everyone else was so obviously shaken. "At the very least, it's going to be more aggressive than an ordinary Weblum, and she's going to choose its targets. We need to figure out how far that control extends."

Pidge grunted an acknowledgement. "All right. Let's experiment."

After that, they shut off their mind. Leaned into the bond, let Val and Green do the thinking for them. Everything about this situation was a landmine waiting to go off. Being in Green, being in Green _without_ Ryner, fighting their dad in Dark Green... Better not to think about any of it, not until it was over and they were back on the castle where a meltdown wouldn't get anyone killed.

Val's concern hovered over them like a stormy sky, dark and oppressive and impossible to ignore, but Pidge was pure motion now, only listening to the others enough to follow their suggestions--Coran mentioned that Weblums were sensitive to Quintessence, motion, and light; Allura suggested that, Weblums not being the most intelligent of creatures, it might focus on the most immediate perceived threat rather than analyzing the situation.

That much, at least, seemed to hold true of Dark Green. She was powerful, and she was violent, and any one lion would have had a tough time facing her alone, but with all of them here, there was no contest. They didn't even have to try all that hard to distract her, and they kept flanking her almost by mistake. She seemed unaware of her surroundings, focusing on whoever was in front of her with a single-minded intensity that was more than a little terrifying.

It made it easy to lead her away from the planet, though, and as the lions continued to pepper her with lasers, her aggression quickly took on a desperate edge.

So she was smart enough to know when she was in danger. That was something to keep in mind.

They forced Dark Green up, beyond the atmosphere, toward the empty sky where no one could get caught in the cross-fire. Shiro and Allura had just begun to discuss how to go about subduing Dark Green without destroying her when the fleet arrived.

The fleet?

The cannon fodder, more like, but that may well have been the intent.

They hit hard and fast, dozens of small and mid-sized vessels blindsiding the lions as they attempted to corral Dark Green toward Quinekka's barren moon. The fleet was never going to outclass Voltron--Zarkon and Haggar would have known that--but it shattered their concentration for an instant, and that was all the time Dark Green needed to slip between Blue and Green and make a break for open space and the wormhole that blossomed to welcome her.

"No!" Pidge roared, turning to give chase. They ignored the ships hounding them, muscling them aside and weathering their attacks as they chased Dark Green.

It was no use. She had too much of a lead, and every impact with an Imperial fighter slowed Green just a fraction, just enough to keep her from closing the distance. The wormhole closed behind Dark Green while Pidge was still twenty lions’-lengths away. They howled in fury and frustration, but the battle still raged behind them, and Val was tugging them back toward the others, sympathy lacing her every thought. Pidge didn't want to go, didn't want to admit defeat, but they relented. (There was no room for thought, for despair. There was only the motion, and the fight... And they would crush every last ship that had come between them and their father.)

* * *

Sam's nerves were still crackling with unspent energy when the guards threw him back into the cell. Today's battle played out before his eyes over and over, every second of it. The destruction he wrought in those first few moments, the swift arrival of the paladins, the Green Lion matching Dark Green move for move, hounding her with a viciousness Sam remembered well.

Pidge never had been able to take an insult sitting down.

There had been a moment, toward the end, where he thought the paladins were going to do it--stop Dark Green for good, pluck Sam out of her cockpit, take him home...

Part of him wished he'd thought to tell Pidge not to bother. However much he wanted to come home, he couldn't leave Rolo, Rax, and Zuza to face these horrors without him.

Part of him was glad he hadn't said anything of the sort, and was devastated that he was back here, again, in the druids’ hands.

Rolo and Rax were in the cell already when he returned, Rax fussing over Zuza, who tried to wave him off, apparently deciding to ignore the new bruise that turned her cheek a shade of purple so dark it looked almost black. Rolo seemed not to notice either of them; he sat against the wall a few feet away, hugging his good leg to his chest and staring at nothing.

It was only once the door slammed shut behind Sam that Rolo looked up, and even then it took his eyes a few moments to focus.

Questions built behind Sam's teeth, fighting to get out. What had happened? That look in Rolo's eyes--part disbelief, part fear, entirely too emotional to conceal... Val had said she'd found Rolo before she and Pidge came to Sam. Was that what had him looking so lost?

He resisted the urge to grab Rolo by the shoulder and demand they step out and talk, here and now. It would draw too much attention from anyone who was watching, for one thing, and for another it wasn't fair to Zuza.

Sam offered Rolo a smile and went to crouch beside Rax, giving Zuza's ankle a gentle squeeze at the same time. "You all right?"

Zuza rolled her eyes. "Fine. Druids wanted to run some more tests on me or something. Apparently they don't appreciate sass, and they hit me. I'm guessing it looks worse than it is, considering _someone_ is hovering over me like I'm about to keel over."

Rax managed to look disgruntled and fretful at the same time, which was such a stark change from the way he'd acted around Rolo early on that it brought a smile to Sam's face. He squeezed Zuza's ankle again and patted Rax on the back.

"Well, you might as well let Rax help. There's not much else for us to do in here."

Rax caught his eye, nodding subtly, and Sam smiled again. He was a perceptive one, that boy, and Sam knew he'd keep Zuza distracted long enough for Sam to have a private chat with Rolo.

Sam sat beside Rolo, put an arm around his shoulders, and leaned in. The posture should let them keep each other upright once they left their bodies, and should disguise the fact that they'd passed out. Rolo tensed, then relaxed against Sam, and they stepped out of themselves together, Sam's hand already on Rolo's back as they took form.

"Sam," Rolo said, emotions building to a crescendo. "Did you--?" He pulled away, pacing the room, anxious energy radiating off him in waves. " _Vrekt._ Something happened while I was out, and I don't know if it was a hallucination or what, and I don't know how _you_ would know, but--"

"Pidge found me," Sam said--in part to stop Rolo's building panic attack, in part because he simply needed to get the words out there.

Rolo looked over at him, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. "They... You mean an astral projection?"

Sam blinked. "Is that what they call it? We didn't have much time to talk. There was another girl there--she called herself Val--she was the one who brought them, and she could only hold it for so long."

Rolo breathed out, short and sharp, and he sagged back against the wall, his hand running down his face. "She brought Nyma to me, too. I thought I'd finally snapped."

"You haven't." Sam crossed to where Rolo stood and squeezed his shoulder. "They're coming for us."

Rolo nodded, a smile tugging at his lips. He opened his mouth to say something more, but the clunk of the door lock interrupted him. In a flash, both Sam and Rolo were back in their bodies, Sam on his feet, Rolo close behind. Rax remained crouched, though he shifted to cover Zuza with his body.

The newest staff member at the lab stood in the door, dressed in the cream-colored uniform most of the staff wore, his pale lavender fur glowing in the hallway's brighter light. He stared at them for a long moment, and Sam thought he understood now what Rolo had meant when he said this one seemed to see them more than the rest of the staff. His eyes were too sharp, his face too carefully neutral--not disinterest, only engineered to look like it.

In the next instant, he’d tossed a square container on the ground at Sam’s feet. Sam glanced at it, but quickly returned his gaze to the new tech.

“Eat up,” the man said, and pressed a button on his gauntlet that opened the top of the container. It was filled with food; Sam didn’t need to look to see that. He could smell it--nothing rich, nothing spiced, but a far cry from the bland and slightly sour-smelling sludge that was their usual rations.

Still Sam stared at the tech, waiting for the trap to spring.

The man only smiled and turned to go. “Trust me,” he said. “You’re going to need your strength.”


	11. Ready to Launch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... After successfully bilocating with Nyma to Rolo, Val took Pidge and they found Sam. They only had time for a short conversation, but it was enough to renew Pidge's hope. They let Matt, Karen, and Shiro watch the conversation using the mind meld, then had Coran track Dark Green's position using the stars Pidge saw through the viewscreen. The paladins tracked Dark Green to an allied world, where Pidge rejoined the fight, flying together with Val inside Green. They nearly succeeded in stopping Dark Green, but Zarkon sent a fleet to act as a distraction, allowing her to escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Experimentation and torture in the scene beginning, "Ulaz didn't wake up," and continuing (less vividly) into the scene that follows. References to dissociation during Akira's POV scene.

“Ulaz drul Erzok.” Sam lifted his eyes from the computer screen to search out Rolo’s in the darkness. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him?”

Rolo rubbed the back of his head. “Afraid not. Then again, we haven’t been involved in the rebellion for ages. Not actively.”

Rax shifted at the edge of the room--not voicing the doubts Sam knew were festering, but not exactly hiding them, either. Sam couldn’t blame him. It was strange enough to have one of their captors deliver food to them, a generous helping of better quality food than any of them had seen in months. Sam had half expected it to be poisoned, but none of them could hold out against the hunger for long.

To his surprise, none of them had gotten sick, but they had found an odd symbol carved into the bottom of the container. Rolo recognized it at once. Said it was the mark of certain rebel factions. A loosely organized resistance to the Empire’s rule--nothing like Voltron and the allies they had gathered, but friends just the same.

Rax had outright refused to believe it, and none of the rest of them were much more inclined to trust. Thus the midnight excursion to dig up any information they could find on their mysterious benefactor.

There wasn’t much, and none of it helped them, but the fact that he was new to the lab, the fact that his behavior had set him apart from the others from the start, and of course the fact that he had helped them and left that symbol behind...

It was impossible to ignore, was all.

“We’re not finding anything more here,” Sam said at length. “Let’s head back.”

* * *

Ulaz's eyes burned as he stared at his computer screen, reviewing the lab's security protocols one last time. It was late, most of his fellow researchers long since turned in, but Ulaz couldn't sleep. Not tonight.

He'd known it would be bad. All of Haggar's projects were, and one that involved the paladins' families, one aimed at replicating the might of Voltron itself--he'd known going in that this would be worse than anything else he'd encountered before. He'd thought he could endure it, as he'd endured so many atrocities before. Wait and watch and learn, and only act once he was sure it was safe to do so.

He couldn't do that here. Maybe it was the urgency of the situation. Haggar had nearly reached her goal. Once Zuza was joined to the nearly-completed Red Lion replica, the collection would be complete, and all that would remain would be to see whether or not they could form Voltron.

Haggar certainly seemed to think they could, and Ulaz couldn't risk the fate of whole galaxies on her being wrong.

But it was more than that. Ulaz had never let himself get hung up on the individuals who suffered because of this war. Not the subjects of experiments he participated in, not civilians who died in weapons tests, not enemy combatants who tried and failed to stop the new horrors Ulaz helped bring into the universe. He looked at numbers, at the abstract. It was the only way he could justify the things he had to do to secure information that would save far more than Ulaz would ever know.

Until now.

Until the paladins.

Until he stepped into the lab with Rolo strapped down to a table, silent and resigned but not yet defeated. Until he stepped into the cell and saw the way four victims banded together.

Haggar had wanted bonds. Needed them.

Well, she had succeeded, perhaps more than she realized. Those four had become a family. They supported each other--relied on each other--to an extent Ulaz honestly wasn't sure he'd ever known.

He wanted to protect them.

This wasn't just about stopping Haggar anymore. He wanted to save these people. He wanted to spare them.

And he couldn't conscience waiting a moment longer than he had to.

He'd planned it all to the minute, considered every possible complication. Transportation had been the biggest hurdle, as Decora kept the hangar locked, and only a select few had unrestricted access to the hangar or the ships inside. But Ulaz had cloned Decora's ID card just this afternoon, solving that particular issue. He knew the guards' rotations and patrol routes, he knew the layout of the cameras along the route they would take from the cell to the hangar. He would loop the footage for those cameras once he was ready to begin, and then there would be no turning back.

He was ready.

He ran through the plan one last time, just to ensure he hadn't overlooked any major stumbling blocks. He would only get one shot at this, so he had to make sure everything went to plan. He had carved a symbol into the inner wall of the storage cube containing the food he’d prepared for them. A mark Rolo ought to recognize, if Ulaz’s intel on his past were at all accurate. A mark long used by rebels. A sign of aid. He hoped it would be enough to earn their trust. There would be no time to convince them once he began.

Then, at last, there was nothing else to check, no other way to postpone the inevitable. After more than two decades with the Accords, minimizing risk and opting to observe rather than intervene, Ulaz drul Erzok was about to throw it all away.

His first stop was the security room where two guards had just gone on shift watching the cameras. There would be no one coming to check in with them for more than an hour, so provided Ulaz could knock them out before they sounded an alarm, he would have plenty of time to get the prisoners and get out, and the looped footage might buy them a few more minutes as the security team tried to figure out what Ulaz's target was.

He made it to the security room without incident, striding in confidently and without a word. Both guards on duty rose and turned toward him--surprised, but not yet suspicious. Ulaz had been here long enough, and the team was small enough, that they knew him, and he'd been careful to give them no reason to doubt his loyalty.

He struck before they could gather their wits enough to wonder what a low-ranking lab tech was doing in the security room in the dead of night. The first guard fell to a high kick, and Ulaz hooked the other's feet out from under him as he dove for the alarm. He tripped, scrambled to his hands and knees, and Ulaz smashed his face into his knee, knocking him out cold.

He shackled them both to a desk leg on the opposite side of the room as the emergency alert, then settled in at the controls, plugging in a data chip to loop the visual feeds.

The door made no sound as it opened, but the light changed, shadows shifting across the work station. Ulaz leaped to his feet, but he was too slow. A fist connected with his face, and then everything went dark.

* * *

Pidge held off three days before they went back to Val, fidgeting furiously with a stim toy in their pocket and guilt making it hard to get the words out.

"Hey," they said, lifting up onto the balls of their feet in the doorway to Val's room. They'd tried to catch her alone four times today, but if she wasn't with Nyma, then she was with her family, and Pidge was going to have a hard enough time asking their question _without_  an audience.

Val turned, her face lighting up. "Pidge, hey! What's up?"

Pidge shrugged, peering through the open bathroom door at a cluster of colorful jars on the counter. "Not much. Listen... I know it's only been a few days, and last time took a lot out of you, so it doesn't have to be _right now_  or anything, but I was just wondering--"

"You want to see your dad again?"

Pidge shut their mouth and shot a cautious look Val's way. She didn't sound annoyed, which was a good sign, but Val was a lot like Lance in that you couldn't always tell when they were genuinely happy to do you a favor and when they just pretended to be so you wouldn't feel bad.

"Yeah. Or--I wanted to know if you think that's something that could happen again soon-ish."

"Of course!" Val grabbed a sweater off the back of her desk chair and pulled it on. "You have time now?"

Pidge straightened up. "Are you sure? If you had plans tonight--"

"Not particularly," Val said. "It's okay, Pidge. You don't have to apologize for wanting to see him again."

Pidge disagreed, but they didn't want to argue Val into retracting her offer. It had taken her some time to recover from the first trips, which was part of why they'd waited to ask about a return. They'd tried to wait for a solid excuse to do it--something they needed to ask their dad, something they needed to verify or were hoping he might have insight on.

Nothing had come up, though, and Val was, as far as Pidge could tell, back to full strength, so even though Pidge felt like they were asking too much of her, they couldn't hold off any longer.

"Thanks, Val," they muttered, keeping pace beside her as they headed out into the hall. Val smiled and wrapped an arm around their shoulders, giving them a squeeze.

It was early evening on the castle-ship, and the usual bustle had begun to calm. Dinner was over, as was most of the day's work. Matt was probably still trying to convince Shiro to call it a night, and Coran would be up with the night crew for hours yet, but most everyone else had returned to the residential floors to relax for a little while before hitting the sack. Pidge kept their head down as they walked with Val, hoping they could avoid any run-ins with the other paladins.

They weren't entirely successful, but no one stopped to chat, and within a few minutes they were outside the Green Lion's hangar.

The ache of Ryner's absence was still a tangible thing in the air here, elastic stretched tight across their skin, a tender bruise deep in the bond. But Val's presence soothed the ache, balanced it, like a hot shower to relax stiff muscles after a long battle. Pidge still couldn't say they were truly comfortable being back here, but as long as they had Val, they were okay.

They headed up into the cockpit together, Green's mind unfurling toward them in greeting. Pidge mirrored the gesture more hesitantly, breathing in sharply when their two minds connected. It wasn't the feedback loop it had been at first, but their shared pain still brought it all rushing back, and Pidge had to take a moment to remember to breathe before they could cross to their chair at the controls and settle in.

Once the initial burst of emotions calmed, though, it was a simple thing to sink into the bond, following Val into the Heart. Pidge had been here only a few times before--once with Val, and a few times with Ryner. (It had only ever been this clear with Ryner once, during the battle for Olkarion, but they knew they'd skimmed the surface of the Heart several times in the last few weeks of searching for their father, even if they hadn't fully entered it.) Pidge didn't yet know the way as surely as Val did, but connected as they were, Pidge was pulled along in Val's wake, landing on the riverbank in the depths of the jungle, Val ankle-deep in the water beside them.

"Am I always going to wind up with wet socks when I come here?" Val asked the sky, rolling her eyes as she climbed out of the river and shook the water from her feet. "Sheesh." She held out her hand for Pidge to take, and Pidge had hardly done so before Val whisked them away in a swirl of color and vertigo.

They landed on the cliff overlooking the ocean, the pristine white tower standing watch at the top of the slope. Pidge's heart began to pound at the sight of it, and they dragged Val up the path, pressing their palm to the stone and focusing their whole being on their dad before Val had a chance to say a word.

Val only smiled, laying her hand over Pidge's. "Ready?"

Pidge nodded, and Val breathed out.

The ocean and the island and the tower bled away between one heartbeat and the next, and Pidge blinked furiously as their eyes tried to focus on the much smaller, much darker space they found themself in. It wasn't Dark Green's cockpit, like the last time Val had jumped them across the universe. Rather, it was a prison cell--steel door with a small transparent panel at eye level, a toilet in the corner, some ratty blankets on the floor in lieu of beds.

Not that there would have been room for beds for all four of the prisoners being held inside. Pidge started immediately towards their dad, a cry on their lips, only to stop short when they realized that, unlike last time, he wasn't on the astral plane the way Pidge and Val were.

He looked tired, more than the last time they'd seen him. Pale and emaciated in his prison uniform without the illusory qualities of the astral plane to make him look more the way Pidge remembered him. He sat against one wall of the cell, his legs stretched out in front of him. Zuza sat beside him, her knees drawn up to her chest with her arms wrapped around them. Sam rubbed her back, and she leaned into the touch, her expression troubled.

"Do you think we can trust him?" she asked in a low voice.

"No," Rax answered at once from the other side of the cell. He was pacing, his nervous energy enough to make Pidge themself tense up. "We know nothing of him or of his intentions. We should not speak of it, in any case. He may be listening."

Rolo, who sat on Sam's other side with his head leaning back against the wall, cracked one eye open. "We do know something, though. That symbol...”

“He may have seen it anywhere,” Rax snapped. “How do you know he is not using it precisely because he knows you would recognize it?”

Rolo snorted. “Don't pretend you aren't hoping just the same as the rest of us."

Rax's mouth turned down in a frown, but Sam held up his free hand before he could respond.

"Rax is right, Rolo. At least about the possibility of us being watched. We should be careful what we say. As for Ulaz... I don't know what to think, and I don't suppose I will until he does something one way or another."

"Ulaz," Pidge hissed, turning to Val. "He’s here? I thought Meri couldn’t get him in."

“She couldn’t.” Val bit her lip, but she couldn’t conceal the hope that lit up her eyes. “He must have kept trying.”

Pidge turned back to their dad, wishing they could talk to him, or maybe simply pull him out of his body. If Ulaz was here--if the paladins knew what he was planning and when-- _Hell_ , if Ulaz could send them the freaking coordinates, they could be here in an hour and have their families' home safe thirty minutes after that.

But though Sam fixed Rax and Rolo both with a meaningful look, they dropped the topic. Sam kept rubbing Zuza's back, Rax gave up his pacing and dropped down beside Rolo, patted his knee, and Sam closed his eyes like he was listening to something Pidge couldn't hear.

"At least they're all right," Val said, shifting closer to Pidge. "I know you wanted to talk to him, but maybe we can try again tomorrow?"

She was right, and Pidge knew it; staying here now wasn't going to do them any good and would only wear Val out more, meaning a longer recovery before she could do this again. But Pidge wasn't ready to throw in the towel.

"We should take a look around," they said, trying to sound determined and not defeated. "Build a map of this place, or… I don’t know. If we can get outside, if I can see the stars--"

Val tipped her head to the side. "Like you did before? It’s worth a try. I'm not sure what my range is or what I'm anchored to, so I can’t promise we’ll make it all the way outside. Depends on how big this place is, I guess.”

Pidge nodded, and they turned for the door, every inch of them drawn back toward their dad. Val walked through the cell door first, and Pidge followed, but not without one last look over their shoulder, just to fix the image of their dad in their mind.

The base quickly captured their attention--a line of empty cells beside their father's, offices and labs full of unfamiliar equipment and computers Pidge itched to hack, dormitories for a comparatively small staff. Pidge would have expected Vindication to commandeer a large portion of Haggar's resources, but there couldn't have been more than two dozen people in this building, unless it was a larger complex than it first seemed.

Val put a hand on Pidge's arm as they came out of the dormitory block, her face grim. "I think that’s about my limit. We’re not going to find anything this way."

Pidge hesitated, but nodded. "All right. Try back the other way, just in case?”

A scream split the silence so suddenly Pidge nearly jumped out of their skin. They spun, but the slate gray corridors vanished as they did so, and something hooked into the bond and _yanked_ , the mental equivalent of whiplash so intense they thought they might have blacked out for a moment. They didn't remember passing through the Heart, as they had last time; one moment they were in the hallways of an Imperial research lab, the next they were back in the Green Lion with a splitting headache that made them instantly nauseous.

Groaning, they doubled over, pressing their fingertips to their temples to try to stem the pounding that felt like their brain trying to burst free of their skull.

"Fuck," they hissed. "What was _that?_ "

There was a sharp intake of breath beside them, then a muttered curse. "Shit, sorry. That was..." Val trailed off, and a moment later, her hand came to rest on Pidge's back. "You okay?"

Pidge squinted against the light streaming in through the viewscreen. "Fine." They lifted their head and frowned. "Are _you_  okay? You look like you're about to puke."

Val laughed, her gaze sliding away from Pidge. "Me? I'm fine. Just... got surprised and lost my grip. Sorry about the migraine. A little sleep usually clears it up for me."

She was deflecting--and not particularly smoothly. Pidge scowled at her for a moment longer, but the pounding of their head made it hard to think, much less have a conversation with someone like Val who was liable to twist Pidge's words around to keep the heat off herself.

"Right," they said at length. "Bed time it is. Don't apologize," they added as Val opened her mouth again. "Thanks for taking me."

"Any time, Pidge," she said, swaying as she climbed to her feet. She lingered in the cockpit after Pidge left, but the castle's lights seemed to be trying to gouge their eyes out. They stumbled back to their room and collapsed on their bed in the soothing darkness.

The screams of an unknown prisoner echoed in their ears for a long while until they managed to fall asleep.

* * *

Ulaz didn't wake up so much as he was ripped out of unconsciousness into a world of heat, pain, and darkness. He was screaming before he came fully awake, his back arching and a vice clamped around his chest. The scream died for lack of air, but his body still fought to get away from the pain.

(There was no getting away from it; the pain came from all angles, bearing down on him until all he could do was pray for it to end.)

When at last the agony eased, it took precious seconds to take stock of the situation. He lay on a table, and the throbbing in discrete bands across his body suggested restraints. Perhaps the vice around his chest was more real than he'd realized. His eyes were slow to open and slower to focus, but he'd spent half his life in research labs; he knew their scent, the off-putting quality of their lights.

He closed his eyes again, breathing before the panic could set in. He'd been caught, obviously, but the fight was just beginning. They would torture him for information, demand names. The Accords put safeguards in place against just this sort of thing, of course; with Thace and Meri safe beyond Haggar's reach, it was only Dez and a handful of other other agents Ulaz might betray, but he would protect them with everything he had--and he'd worked with the druids closely enough to know how to do that. Say nothing. Stay silent. Force them to bring in the druids. Then, when they attempted to ply his mind for secrets he wouldn't speak, rend his mind on their claws, destroying it before they could find what they wanted.

He breathed, and he waited--waited for the questions, waited for the pain. Someone was moving around him. Several someones. Strange, for an interrogation. The Questioners usually preferred to work alone.

"Ready."

A voice, startlingly close beside his head, but it spoke to someone else with clinical disinterest, and Ulaz had only a moment to wonder what they were doing to him before a machine started up with a whine that grated on Ulaz's nerves and the vice clamped down on his chest once more. Not the restraints; this was something more visceral, a phantom hand reaching into his chest and seizing his heart, his lungs. The pull brought a cry to his lips but stole the breath that would have given it voice. Ulaz shuddered, pulling at his restraints, fighting to curl up, to protect his vulnerable core, to hold inside whatever it was they were trying to pry out.

For a single, horrifying moment, all sensation fell away. All was silent, still, and dark, and the world shrank to a single point of consciousness, disconnected from reality.

He slammed back into his body with a jolt that left him reeling, gasping for air. Tears left cool streaks down the sides of his flushed face, and his vision blurred as he tried to track the figures darting all around him.

"Awake at last, I see."

Ice slid into Ulaz's roiling gut, and he stilled, tilting his head as far as the restraints would allow to trace the voice to its origin.

Lady Haggar stood beside the table he'd been strapped to, dressed not in her usual black robes, but in the standard off-white coat of Imperial medical staff. The techs and researchers of the Vindication team moved around her with their eyes down, even Decora herself adopting a deferential, almost meek demeanor as she assisted Haggar in her work.

And Ulaz knew his fate was sealed. He'd heard rumors that Haggar herself had pioneered many of the procedures used in creating robeasts and cybernetic warriors. He knew her own personal research had laid the foundation for much of the Empire's modern technology and almost all druidic magic. But that was in the distant past. How distant depended on which rumors you believed about the true age of Zarkon's Right Hand.

It didn't matter much in the end. Haggar wasn't one to get her hands dirty these days. Not with interrogations, and not with experiments. She supervised, she theorized, she punished those who didn't produce sufficient results. But she was far above the dirty work that fed her insatiable hunger for progress. The fact that she was here now, and taking the lead, meant that the best Ulaz could hope for was for his mind to break quickly.

Haggar smiled, perhaps seeing the terror in Ulaz's eyes. He prided himself on his stoicism, but he had never prepared himself for something like this.

"Don't worry," she said, almost conversational. "I'm not here to pry your secrets out of you. They're not worth the time it would take, and I have higher honors in mind for you."

Ulaz returned his gaze to the ceiling, refusing to give her the satisfaction of asking what she meant to do with him. She would do it whether he asked or not, and he would suffer just the same whether or not he knew what was coming.

Haggar, though, didn't seem to mind his silence. "You've seen what we're doing here. You know how close we are. All that's lacking is a single pilot. Zarkon's new right hand. The girl we took is too weak-willed, and the mighty emperor no longer trusts me to fill this role..." She hummed, turning to adjust a dial on a device nearby. "Or perhaps he knows he cannot dominate me as he can the others. It scares him..."

Ulaz thought, perhaps, that Zarkon was right to fear this witch. He ruled the universe, but she could rewrite the very laws of existence on a whim. Ulaz knew which he would rather face.

Haggar's eyes returned to Ulaz's face and narrowed, and the conversational tone vanished from her voice.

"Time is short. Begin the process."

Someone, somewhere, powered up the machine. Ulaz had seen it several times before, had heard an explanation of how it worked, loosening the bonds between Quintessence and body, allowing Decora and her staff to forge an artificial bridge with the lions' hearts. He'd never seen it in action, though; three of the prisoners were much too far along for it to be needed, and Decora kept putting off Zuza's next session.

It would seem she'd known all along Zuza wasn't the one Haggar had chosen.

Ulaz had only a moment to reflect on his own failure, to wonder what he'd done to give himself away, to impart an apology to the universe for the paladins and their family he wasn't able to save.

This was his battle. He'd always known it might be his last.

He'd just hoped if he'd died it would be to give Sam Holt and the others a fighting chance.

* * *

The new prison complex was significantly smaller than the old; Rolo had confirmed it time and time again during his nightly excursions with Sam. Their cell was closer to the labs, and there were fewer unused rooms overall, giving the place less the feel of a research complex past its prime and more that of a complex that had been designed for something as small and secretive as Vindication was. It was small enough, in fact, that from the cell on one side of the building, Rolo could reach almost every point in the complex--all except the lions' hangar, which Sam had inspected once before declaring it not worth the effort.

(Rolo suspected that was more to do with the presence of the lions and their overpowering consciousnesses than anything else.)

But the compound had never felt as small as it did when a horrible scream--almost the yowl of an animal in pain--echoed down the hall.

Rolo only heard it because the cell was silent, all of them lost in thought and just waiting for Zuza to fall asleep so they could sneak off to the astral plane to talk about Ulaz without fear of discovery. At first, Rolo mistook the scream for the protest of an overworked engine, but first Zuza, then Rax stiffened, their heads swiveling toward the door. Zuza shrank down against Sam, who seemed not to have yet noticed anything, and Rax curled in on himself the way he did when he was trying not to put a target on his back.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

Rolo hesitated. "Sounded like a scream."

"I thought we were the only prisoners here," Zuza said, looking to Sam like he would have the answer. (As a matter of fact, he did, and so did Rolo and Rax: there _weren't_  any other prisoners in the complex, or there hadn't been last night. But of course none of them had any way to have known that, so they couldn't say as much to Zuza.)

"Try not to think about it," Sam said at length, hugging Zuza closer. "There's nothing we can do from here, anyway."

Rolo caught his eye and knew he was thinking the same thing as Rolo. The same thing as Rax, too, no doubt. They couldn't do anything from here, it was true.

First, they had to get closer.

Sam ducked his head, putting his lips close to Zuza's ear, and whispered something that made her frown. A few ticks later, her eyes went wide.

"Don't react," he ordered, a little louder as Zuza began to pull away. "We can't be sure the druids aren't watching or listening in."

Zuza froze at once, her shock giving way to a calculating frown. She stared at Rolo, darted a glance to Rax, then relaxed back against Sam and nodded. She turned her head into his shoulder, muffling whatever it was she said next, but Sam smiled.

"Exactly." He gave her shoulders a squeeze. "We can talk more later, deal?"

"Deal," she said, and followed Sam's lead as he went through the motions of bedding down. There was no telling if it was night now or not; the cell block didn't have anything like clocks or lighting cycles to indicate something like that--but in some ways that worked to their advantage. If the guards weren't going to give them an indication of when it was the appropriate time to sleep, then they couldn't get too suspicious when their prisoners napped at irregular intervals.

Rolo was the last to settle in, shifting so he was on Zuza's other side. He gave her arm a squeeze and offered her a smile. "We'll be quick," he promised her, the words barely a whisper as he lay down beside her.

She caught his hand as he pulled away and squeezed, mouthing the words, _Be careful_ , before she rolled over.

"She won't sleep," Rolo said the instant he was free of his body. Sam and Rax were already waiting for him, Rax's form fuzzing at the edges in anxiety. "You know that, right? She's going to be worried sick the entire time we're gone."

"I know." Sam closed his eyes. "It can't be helped. We need to know what's happening. Any change to the routine is bad news for us."

Wasn't that the truth?

Rolo spared one final thought for Zuza before he followed the others out of the cell, skimming from lab to lab in search of the newcomer whose scream they'd heard. When they found him, Rolo's heart sank.

"Guess he wasn't tricking us after all," he breathed.

Rax cursed, and Sam crossed the room in an instant. All Rolo could do was watch, horrified, as Ulaz writhed on the table they'd strapped him to--a table not unlike the one Rolo had been strapped to more times than he cared to remember. The hum of a familiar machine filled the air, making Rolo queasy with the memory of those first few, violent separations.

"I thought Zuza was going to be their Red," Rolo said, the words seeming to come from a long way away. "Why keep her around if they were going to use Ulaz?"

Sam shook his head. "I would imagine they didn't want to arouse his suspicions. Or maybe they hadn't made the final call yet; I'm not sure."

Rax cursed again, and Rolo felt the same frustration echoed in his gut. Just when he'd started to think that they might have a shot at getting out of here, this happened. It was like Decora wanted to remind them just how powerless they were, and just how little they really knew.

For a moment, Ulaz's form seemed to waver, his Quintessence straining at the limits of his physical body. Sam stepped forward, ready to grab him, to steady him, once he fully separated.

Suddenly the machine wound down, and Ulaz snapped back into his body with a jerk.

"Proceed to phase two."

Rolo gave a start as Haggar's voice rang out. He hadn't seen her at first, dressed as she was in the garb of the medical staff, with her back to him. But he'd heard her voice often enough on Imperial airwaves--intercepted transmissions, propaganda put out by the Empire, news stations playing recordings of her rare speeches. Haggar wasn't exactly the face of the Empire, but she was impossible to forget.

He moved to the far side of the table to get a look at her face. "Shit."

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"That's Haggar--the most powerful person in the Empire if you don't count Emperor Zarkon himself. Maybe even if you do."

Sam's brow furrowed. "What's she doing here?"

"I don't know, but it can't be good."

"Lady Haggar, your pardon," Decora said, so meekly Rolo nearly didn't believe it was her, "but shouldn't we put him with the others for a few days? The bonds--"

"The bonds will suffice, Decora," Haggar said. "Why do you think we let his little game continue as long as we did? We needed to let him make contact with the others. Never underestimate the potency of hope."

Haggar waved Decora back, and Decora obliged, the rest of the team following her lead until Haggar alone remained at Ulaz's bedside.

"What's she doing?" Rolo asked, glancing to Sam as Haggar shook back her sleeves and raised her hands. Quintessence began to gather there, crackling like dark lightning between her fingertips. "They never did anything like this to us."

Sam opened his mouth, already shaking his head, but something else joined them in the room, quashing conversation. Rolo froze, feeling as though the hair along the back of his neck were standing on end. It was the sensation of being watched, being _hunted_ , and he cast his gaze about, searching for the source of the horrible, oppressive sensation. He found nothing, only a room that held its breath as Haggar bowed over Ulaz.

The hunter's attention turned away from Rolo, and at the same instant, Ulaz jerked in his restraints, his eyes going wide and staring at nothing. He gasped for air, and then he screamed. It was pure terror, that sound, and Rolo fought with all his will not to run.

When it was over, Haggar calmly stepped aside, allowing the medical techs back in to take readings and affix a silver device--the master key, as the paladins called it--to the base of Ulaz's skull. Haggar herself crossed to a terminal along one wall, pressed her hand to a panel, and opened a transmission.

"This is Haggar," she said, crisp. "Tell Lord Zarkon it is done. His paladins await his command."

* * *

Akira stood, trembling, in the shadow of the Red Lion, a voice just beyond hearing ringing in the silent air around him. She stood tall and proud, fresh paint gleaming in the hangar's lights. Without the repair crew bustling around as they had for the past week, the space felt too big--odd, considering Red generally liked her space, which meant her hangar was usually one of the quieter places on the castle-ship, reserved for those she knew best and trusted most. Akira himself had come down here time and again in search of a quiet moment to breathe, away from the pressures of the Guard.

Maybe that was what had brought him down here today. Pressure. Stress. Red was probably telling him to take a break.

...He would have appreciated it if she'd given him a heads-up instead of taking the wheel.

"Weren't you the one who said this was dangerous?" Akira asked, his voice ringing loud in the silence. Red remained impassive. Her nose in the air was pure happenstance, but it felt like she was deliberately snubbing him. She'd come to a few days ago, shortly before the battle against Dark Green, though Coran's crew hadn't finished the last of the repairs until last night.

Akira hadn't caught so much as a sniff from her in that time. Then, out of nowhere, she comes blazing in, flipping a switch in his head, taking control, dragging him down to her hangar...

He struggled to remember what he'd been doing when she took control. He'd been working with Layeni for most of the day, but they'd finished early...? He must have been on his way back to his room, or maybe toward the kitchens for a late dinner.

Next thing he knew, he was here, his skin stretched tight like an ill-fitting suit, no memory of changing course or of the walk down. Just a blink, and everything was different--just like last week, when she'd gone rushing _out_  of her body and commandeered Akira to come check on her paladins.

It wasn't like it had been on New Altea. Akira wasn't a passenger in his body, aware of his actions but disconnected. Last week, he'd felt only a hazy sort of urgency, seen Keith and Matt through tunneled vision, his head too foggy to care that everything was happening devoid of context.

Today, there had been nothing at all.

"So, what?" he asked the lion, spreading his hands wide before wrapping them around himself once more. "Is this going to be a thing with us? You hitch a ride whenever you want, kick me to the curb? Did you even have a _reason_  for dragging me down here, or were you just bored?" He tipped his head back, searching her face for any sign that she heard him. "I know I said I didn't care--and I _didn't_  care the first time. Not really. Even last week was... I get it. And I'd have wanted to be here for them anyway. But if you're just going to take control randomly? If I'm going to start blanking out all the time, ditching the Guard, leaving my post--"

She said nothing, did nothing, gave no sign that he was even here.

"I don't know what's happening, and I'm... I'm _scared_ , okay? _You're_ scaring me."

He snapped his mouth shut as soon as the words were out, glancing self-consciously around the hangar. He was alone, of course, but the weight of his admission made him feel claustrophobic. He crossed his arms, staring up at Red for another long moment. He wasn't sure what he was waiting for, just as he wasn't sure why she'd brought him here.

What he got was a tremble in his chest and a vague impression of an apology.

It made his eyes burn, and he cursed, turning his back on Red and leaving the hangar before he broke down entirely.

* * *

"What do you think you're going to accomplish by freezing Keith out?" Thace stood his ground as Keena turned toward him, a warning in her eye that didn't translate to her relaxed posture and bemused smile.

"Freezing him out? What makes you think I'm doing anything like that?"

Thace resisted the urge to scoff. As though he hadn't seen the way she'd been acting. Conveniently showing up on the bridge, or in the mess hall, or in the corridors when Keith was passing through, only to pointedly ignore him--that was, when she didn't meet his eyes before excusing herself. (Not rudely, never rudely, but deliberately.) Keith tried not to let it bother him, tried not to let it show, but Thace saw the tension he carried in his shoulders, the emotion that made his ears quiver any time he caught sight of her.

It was Keena's usual mind games: flipping the script, positioning Keith as the villain, as the betrayer, as the guilty party. More importantly, it was Keena, painting herself as the victim, _again._ She didn't have to say anything to concoct a scenario in which Keith had hurt Keena so badly she couldn't stand to be in the room with him--and though Keith had no reason to feel as though he'd done anything wrong, Keena's actions were causing him a great deal of distress.

"I'm not interested in playing games today, Keena," he said, carefully neutral. It would be too easy to make this into a fight, and he didn't trust his sister not to twist that to her advantage somehow. "I'm just here to tell you that you've missed your chance to be his mother. You've missed your chance to earn his respect and his loyalty. I don't know how you see this all playing out, and I don't particularly care. I'm done, and you need to leave."

She laughed. "Leave? Thace I'm here on behalf of the council of New Altea. I can't just _leave._ "

"We both know you pulled strings to get yourself stationed here. You can pull some more to get yourself transferred."

"I'd rather not."

Thace closed his eyes, a growl building deep in his throat. "Keena--"

In his pocket, his comms unit buzzed the pattern of an emergency call. He scowled at Keena and reached for his pocket.

"We'll finish this later."

* * *

Hunk's heart pounded in his chest as people continued to pour onto the bridge--not just the paladins, not just their adjuncts, but all of the most experienced members of Coran's crew, including Thace, who hardly ever put in a shift on the bridge, and Layeni, who stood with Akira, glowering like she expected the enemy to step out of the shadows. Shiro and Allura were still conferring with Coran at the central dais, their low tones and tense postures painting a grim picture.

"What do you think's happening?" Hunk whispered to Lance, who stood beside him, arms crossed and foot tapping.

Lance shook his head. "It's not good, whatever it is."

"You think it's the Vkullor again?" Hunk ducked his head as Lance whipped his around to fix him with a wild stare. " _What?_  They're acting like it's the end of the world. That sounds pretty Vkullor-y to me."

"It's not the Vkullor," Lance hissed, but his lips were puckered in a way that made Hunk think that Lance didn't believe his own words.

They didn't have much more time to speculate, for good or ill, because that was the moment Shiro and Allura finally broke away from their hushed conference to face the room.

"We've just received word from our allies in the Coalition. Zarkon's lions have been spotted in the region of Neivynn." Allura spoke without preamble or inflection, like if she just ripped the bandaid off it wouldn't hurt so much.

Hunk wasn't sure it worked.

"Oh, shit," Matt muttered, his fingers tangling in his hair as, beside him, Keith's lips parted in surprise, his hands falling to his sides.

Lance screwed his eyes shut, and Val's looked like they were about ready to fall out of her head, and Nyma glared at Allura, nary a chink in her composure.

"Lions?" she asked. "Plural?"

Shiro nodded. "The initial report didn't give a specific number, but they were very clear that it was several of them."

"There's a big difference between two dark lions and five," Pidge said, scowling.

Hunk's blood went cold. "You think they could've finished with Zuza already?"

"I wouldn't put it past them." Pidge crossed their arms over their chest, staring at the floor. "They don't care if it's safer to go slow. If Zarkon wants the full team now, someone's gonna find a way to get it done now."

"We don't know that the last lion is finished yet," Allura said firmly--then hesitated, her stern expression wavering as she looked to Coran. "But we do need to be prepared for the possibility. We know Zarkon wants to build his own Voltron. We know he has at least four lions ready for action. Today and every day moving forward, we need to be prepared for the possibility that this is going to turn into a Voltron-on-Voltron fight."

There was something inherently wrong with the phrase Voltron-on-Voltron, and Hunk shuddered, scooting closer to Shay, who looked like she was going to be sick.

"The paladins will take the lead," Shiro said. "As far as we've heard the lions are acting alone, without a support fleet of any kind. We aren't going to trust those reports too far, of course, so Akira, Layeni, if you could have the Guard ready to launch."

Akira nodded, his expression grim.

"We're not sure what Zarkon's target is," Allura said, "but we don't intend to let him reach it. Be ready to launch in fifteen minutes."

* * *

Pidge's hand shook as they donned their armor. Going up against Dark Green was scary. Going up against all of Dark Voltron? Downright horrifying. They told themself that they weren't there yet. Haggar had had Rax and Rolo in her grasp for nearly a year before Dark Blue and Dark Yellow entered the scene. Even if she'd sped up the process, surely it was going to take months before Zuza and Dark Red were anywhere near ready.

They didn't believe that, and their heart was pounding in their chest as they caught Val's eye--also wild with that same fear that couldn't be reasoned away--and headed up into Green.

Currents of anxiety and worst-case scenarios filled the cockpit, all three minds dreading what they would find. When it was just one lion at a time, it was different. The paladins easily overpowered a single opponent, which meant they had a chance to try to corner it, cripple it, and rescue the pilot. Pidge would have jumped at a battle against any single lion, maybe even any two.

They weren't so optimistic as to believe they would only find two out there today.

"Everyone ready?" Shiro called, his and Allura's feeds popping up in the corner of the viewscreen.

"I don't think we'll ever be _ready_ ," Matt said, grinning the way he did when he was trying not to show his nerves. "But we're here."

"God, same," Val said, starting up Green's scanner suite and arranging the display the way she liked. Shay and Lance echoed the sentiment, and Allura called up to the bridge to give Coran the go-ahead. He would keep the castle-ship on the edge of the system, providing cover fire if needed and giving the Guard quick access to the battlefield if it came to that.

All the adjuncts had joined his team on the bridge, both to serve as extra hands and as a precaution. Pidge knew Coran was hoping their mother's knowledge might come in handy--she'd spent the entire briefing looking like she wanted to say something, but only shook her head when prompted. Akira was there for a similar reason, but also to keep an eye on the battle. If things went bad, he could call down to Layeni, who was readying their forces, and give her the order to launch.

Pidge wasn't sure what Hunk's family was going to do, to be honest, but as the newest adjuncts, their abilities were also the biggest question mark.

It seemed an impossibly long time before they arrived, the silence pooling around Pidge and Val like syrup, broken only by the hum of Green's engines and the occasional _pop_  of something settling. 

"All right, team," Shiro called. "Let's go. Spread out, and keep your eyes open."

Pidge eased Green out of the hangar, activating her cloak before they cleared the airlock. This was supposed to be an ambush, after all, even if no one really seemed to expect it to go to plan.

They saw them almost at once: Dark Green in the distance, with blue and yellow counterparts behind her. As with Dark Green, they were carbon copies of their originals, but painted deep black between garishly colored armor plates. The colors clashed horribly with the magenta glow of synthetic Quintessence, making it difficult for Pidge's eyes to focus on them.

"Is it just the three of them?" Lance asked, relief warring with cynicism in his voice.

"Zarkon's here, too." Allura's voice was cold, flat.

Val frowned, her hand hovering over her display. "Are you sure? I don't see him on any of my scans."

Shiro shook his head. "He's here. I don't know if he plans to get involved or if he's just watching, but there's no doubt. This is the same thing I felt at the summit when he attacked."

"Are you going to be okay?" Akira asked. "The last time you tangled with him--"

"The last time I tangled with him, I was alone," Shiro said. He didn't sound annoyed, exactly, but he shut down Akira's worry just the same. "Black and I have worked on things since then, and we've got Allura here. We'll be fine."

Lance frowned. "And you'll tell us the second that changes, right?"

Shiro sighed. "Sure, Lance. Yes. I'll tell you if that changes."

"Okay. Then let's go."

There was no more discussion after that. Pidge leaned forward, pushing Green's engines to their maximum. Dark Green was dead ahead, filling Pidge's vision. They'd fought her before; they knew what she was capable of--and, though they didn't like to admit it, they didn't trust anyone else to get this right.

The others fell into formation around the Green Lion, Yellow squaring up against Dark Blue and Blue against Dark Yellow as though by unspoken agreement. Some corner of Pidge's mind acknowledged that it was a smart move, and not just because of the emotions at play. Yellow was the team's tank--she was slow, but she hit hard, and she could take a beating. If she went up against Dark Yellow, though, they were liable to tear each other apart. Better for Blue to take on Dark Yellow, dodging all her attacks and chipping away with her own weapons, while Yellow tanked whatever Dark Blue might be able to dish out, leaving the others to go on the offensive.

Zarkon's lions saw them coming--of course they did. They were in the middle of open space, and as far as Pidge could tell, Haggar had made her lions to be as close to the real lions as possible. They'd have all the same scanners, so of course they'd be able to see the paladins from as far away as the paladins were able to see them.

That didn't mean the dark lions had much time to prepare. They came alert, lifting their heads and turning toward the charging paladins, but Keith and Matt weren't in a mood to mess around. They pulled away from the rest of the paladins, closing the distance in an instant, and barreled into Dark Green. It didn't do much damage, but it spun them both around, sending Dark Green tumbling out of formation and leaving the other two that much more open to the rest of the team's attack.

"Matt, Keith, clear the way," Pidge said. "We'll take point on Dark Green; I know what its capable of."

Matt hesitated, breathing in a way that suggested a protest he wasn't sure he wanted to voice. "...Okay. Are you sure--"

Whatever he was about to ask, Pidge didn't hear it. Something crashed into them, a horrible rending screech of metal on metal and a matching roar from Green as her hull buckled and alarms began to blare. Somewhere in the disorienting whirl, Val cursed, and Pidge struggled to wrench the yokes back under their control as Green tumbled tail over ears.

"Pidge! Val!" Lance's voice was shrill, ending in a grunt and a cry of frustration from Nyma. Meri snapped at him to focus, her voice oddly muffled, her words underscored by a frantic concern Pidge could feel tugging at a distant corner of their mind.

"I'm fine," Pidge grunted, finally regaining control of Green. "Val?"

Val answered with a fluttering thought before she found her voice. "Dizzy, but I'm not hurt or anything. What hit us?"

Their answer was a roar through the comms and a flash of red past their viewscreen. Pidge swung Green's head around to follow Red's charge, and the bottom dropped out of their stomach as Red crashed into a scarlet blur that could only have been the fifth and final member of Zarkon's team.

It moved too fast to get a good look at it--a streak of deeper, darker red than Matt and Keith's lion, closer to blood; a flash of electric green eyes that were nothing like the magenta glow of the other lions’, cutting lines through the darkness like a comet's tail. It writhed as Red slammed into it, twisting more like a snake than a lion, flexing out of Red's grasp and carving deep gouges in her side as it broke away.

As soon as it was free, it turned its sights back to Green, and Pidge's blood ran cold. They flooded Green with power, taking off, but Dark Red was faster, and as its teeth sank into Green's hind leg, Pidge's ankle flared in sympathy, a half-remembered agony from when they'd dislocated their ankle in their first fight with Dark Green.

Dark Green. They spun, panic clawing at their throat, trying to fend off Dark Red and search the skies for Dark Green at the same time--but Shiro and Allura had already thought of that. They danced with Dark Green, harrying her--careful not to do too much damage; Shiro would be as conscious of that as Pidge, they knew--but neither was Black letting her foe through to take advantage of Green's distraction.

"What the _fuck_ ," Matt muttered, each word ground out through clenched teeth as he and Keith charged in again, latching onto Dark Red in an attempt to pry it off of Green. "How does this thing even know where you are?"

The question floundered in Pidge's ears for a moment, incomprehensible, until their mind caught up with the chaos.

The cloak.

At a stray impulse from Pidge, Val checked the status--and sure enough, the cloak was still active. Dark Red shouldn't have been able to see them; not on its scanners, and not with Zuza's eyes. It absolutely shouldn't have been able to strike with enough precision to catch Green's leg in its jaws. Luck? Or could this thing somehow see through Pidge's cloaking tech?

"I don't know," Val said, as though Pidge had asked the question aloud, "but it's not showing up on my scanners at all--any of them."

Hunk's breath hitched at the same moment as a bolt of familiarity shot through Pidge. They sumberged themself in the bond, looking out through Val's eyes, skimming the surface of her recent memories--it was faster than looking through every scan themself, and Val obliged by pushing those memories to the surface. Nothing on the BLIP-tech, nothing on the radar, or the proximity alarms, or the EM scans. As far as the computer was concerned, they'd been hit by nothing, and nothing was currently trying to rip their leg off.

Pidge's hands--Val's hands--flew out, typing out a sequence. They'd been working on a new sensor with Ryner just before her death. It wasn't finished yet, but early tests were promising. With Dark Green copying all of their tech, they'd been worried about her cloaking herself, and they'd developed something to peel back that cloak.

(It wasn't that; they already knew it wasn't a cloak--not like the one Pidge had designed, anyway. They could see it, plain as day. It wasn't hiding, it just didn't register, but there was only one thing they'd ever encountered that didn't show up on any scan.)

**It's made from a Vkullor.**

Pidge forgot how to breathe as the words painted themselves across their viewscreen.

**I don't know if you know what that is; I only have a hazy idea myself.**

"Dad."

For a moment, the rest of the battle fell away. The pain in their foot, the voices on the comms, the flash of lasers and indicator lights and the nauseating swirl of stars as Red and Dark Red and Green continued to wrestle in a flailing knot of limbs and teeth and tails. It was just Pidge and the words on the screen and a weight on the back of their neck like their dad had joined them in the cockpit.

**I didn't mention it before. Slipped my mind with everything else, I guess.**

Pidge laughed, tears prickling at the corners of their eyes. "Don't blame you. I didn't say half of what I wanted to, either."

**I wish I had more to tell you, but I didn't understand most of what was in those files. All I can tell you is the species of the creatures they used to make the lions.**

The words continued to flood the screen, listing them out--Vkullor, Niskaia, Balmera, Welbum (they'd been right about that, then. For all the good it did.) But their head was spinning. Dark Red was made from a Vkullor. All the lions were made from creatures on a scale Pidge _still_  could barely comprehend. Old creatures, powerful creatures-- _intelligent_  creatures, even if not always intelligent in a way Pidge found familiar.

Pidge supposed if Haggar had been trying to replicate the mind of a Voltron Lion, it only made sense. What else in all the universe could even come close?

**I don't know if any of this even helps, but I thought**

"It helps," Pidge said, before the words were done typing themselves out. "I'm not sure how we're going to _beat_  this thing, but it does help. Matt?"

"Yeah?" Matt's voice sounded strangled, breathless, and Pidge faltered for a moment. They'd tuned out the rest of the world for a moment there, but it all started filtering back in now, and they thought that they'd been hearing Matt's voice for a while. Matt's and their mother's. They must have heard Pidge talking to their dad.

Wetting their lips, Pidge plowed ahead. "I'm turning off my cloak. Do me a favor and back up, then turn yours on. I want to see if it's attracting Dark Red somehow."

Shiro came on the line, his words humming with unease. "I don't know if that's--"

"Ready," Keith said, and Pidge disengaged the cloak.

A second later, Matt said, "It's on. Let's see if--"

Dark Red released Green so fast it knocked Pidge for a loop, and there was a moment of chaos as Keith and Matt both yelped in alarm, Shiro cried out a warning, a horrible _crunch_  echoed over the comms.

" _Vrekt,_ " Keith muttered. "I think we're going to just keep the cloak off for now."

Pidge grimaced. "Sorry. Didn't expect it to be so... enthusiastic."

Somewhere, distantly, they remembered Allura, or maybe Coran, tell them how the earliest cloaking technologies had been developed based on the Vkullor's natural cloaking ability. Was that why Dark Red went after cloaked Lions so viciously? Did some part of it recognize the cloak? Did it think they were a rival Vkullor encroaching on its turf?

(Could they use that to their advantage the next time they faced the _actual_  Vkullor?)

That was a thought for later. For now, there was a battle to fight, and it quickly became apparent that Green simply couldn't keep up with Dark Red. _Red_  could barely keep up with Dark Red.

So Pidge and Val swapped places with Shiro and Allura, letting the faster lions try to contain the living storm that was a Lion-Vkullor chimera.

They held the line.

That was the best Pidge could say for the battle that followed: Zarkon's lions weren't overpowering the paladins, but the paladins weren't gaining any ground, either. Maybe if they'd been going for the kill-- _maybe_  then they could have won. One quick, ruthless strike to bring down the first target, and the others would follow.

But ruthless was off the table, and careful wasn't winning any points.

Shiro and Allura flowed from conflict to conflict, smoothly interjecting into the battle wherever they were most needed--helping Keith and Matt to fend off Dark Red, mostly, but leaping in to defend anyone who happened to become Dark Red's target du jour.

Dark Red really was nothing like the rest of the lions. Green, Blue, and Yellow's counterparts were smart about how they fought. They strategized, they adapted to the paladins' tactics. They were aware of each other, and functioned almost like a team--an unpracticed one, to be sure, but they didn't let themselves be tricked into attacking one another, and once or twice one of them even shifted focus to draw some heat off a teammate who was taking a beating. It was a far cry from how scattered Dark Green had been even just the last time the paladins had encountered her, and Pidge had to wonder if this was Zarkon's influence. If _this_ was why he was close enough for Shiro and Allura to sense, but not taking part in battle.

If so, even Zarkon didn't seem able to control Dark Red. Its strategy, if it had one at all, changed from moment to moment, as Dark Green's had before. It attacked the first target it saw, ignoring other, closer threats that weren't in direct line of sight. It didn't seem to care how many times it got hit, or how many times it hurt one of its teammates along with one of the paladins. Pidge wasn't convinced it even really saw a difference between the two groups, though it did attack the paladins marginally more often than it attacked Zarkon's lions.

Pidge thought of the way the Vkullor fought, single-minded and easily distracted at the same time, indiscriminate in its violence. Haggar didn't know what she'd taken on when she decided to make one of her lions out of a Vkullor.

Unfortunately, it was Zuza who was likely to pay the price, and as the battle wore on, Pidge found their attention straying from Dark Green more and more often, latching onto Dark Red and spinning circles in search of a way to subdue it. For any of the other lions, the question was how to approach it to do the least damage to the pilots, but with Dark Red, they had a much more basic dilemma than that.

Dark Red was a wildfire blazing out of control, and Pidge was desperately trying not to accept that their only recourse might be to let it burn itself out.

Pidge didn't know how long Zarkon let it go on like that, nine lions clashing with none rising above the pack. It might have been ten minutes; it might have been an hour. Pidge was hyper-focused in a way that made time lose its meaning, hounding Dark Green, analyzing Dark Red, always on the lookout for a cheap shot from behind.

So when Zarkon's lions suddenly pulled out, it left Pidge floundering, the empty space around them and the sudden absence of the _thud-groan-scream_  of Dark Green's attacks in their ears leaving them light-headed. Val's head spun, too, but she reached out for Pidge anyway, and they turned, searching for where Dark Green had gone.

Zarkon's Black Lion lurked in the distance, almost indistinguishable from the backdrop of space but a blazing beacon of Quintessence on the BLIP-tech scan. His Blue, Green, and Yellow Lions had already gathered around him, Dark Red lingering a moment longer where it was clawing at Red's back like it was trying to burrow inside to reach her pilots.

It jerked suddenly, head lifting to glare at Zarkon's lion--and it _felt_ like a glare, for all Dark Red's face was incapable of emotion. It fired one last parting shot at the base of Red's skull, then slunk back to join the others. For a breathless moment, Pidge thought they might be leaving.

The light changed, achingly familiar for all they'd never seen it from the outside before, and oh, they couldn't have been more wrong.

Zarkon's paladins weren't leaving--not in the slightest.

They were only getting started.


	12. The Light of Altea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Zarkon's lions are all fully functional, with Ulaz filling the last spot as the pilot of Dark Red. He took them out for a test flight, and Voltron met them head-on. It was a close battle, Dark Red's fury and unpredictability making it an uphill climb. Despite it all, the paladins slowly began to gain the upper hand--but this battle is only just getting started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Mind control, severe dissociation, slightly more intense violence than usual, and minor character death. (Reminder that you can read [chapter summaries](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONOvacvwBb13SZO3-sMtCbQzVEHWP0ej1oHgh7janDQ/edit?usp=sharing) on Google Docs if a more detailed heads-up would be helpful.)

"Ulaz? Ulaz!"

Sam pressed through the machinery of Zarkon's Red Lion, searching for any sign of Ulaz. His body sat in the pilot's seat, as hollow-eyed as any of them, and being too near it put a pit in Sam's stomach. Like being too near someone who'd had their consciousness ripped out was like venturing too near a black hole. Like he was liable to get pulled into that absence of self if he wasn’t careful. It was the same with any of their bodies, when they were like this.

"Are you here? Ulaz!"

It was difficult to navigate this lion, not just because all its thrashing made it difficult for Sam to orient himself. The Vkullor's presence hung over this place, raising the hairs on the back of Sam's neck, making him feel small and powerless and breathless with fear.

He'd been here too long already. After speaking briefly with Pidge, he'd forced himself to go an check on Rolo and Rax, then to focus on the Welbum at the heart of his own lion. None of them were having much luck communicating yet, and what little Sam did get--death, decay, the inexorable creep of time--left him wallowing in a pit of nihilistic apathy.

So he'd come to look for Ulaz, hoping against hope that he might have kept hold of himself through it all.

He was quickly coming to the realization that he wasn't going to find anything. Either Ulaz was still trapped inside his body, never having been fully separated as the others had been, or his consciousness had been torn free too violently and had dispersed before either of them could realize what was happening.

Something rippled in the air, echoing through the narrow passages in the lion's core, reverberating in Sam's chest and leaving him lightheaded. He returned to the cockpit in an instant, stumbling as he arrived off-balance, and scanned the battlefield for some sign of whatever had just hit them.

"Paladins." The voice on the comms thrummed with power, low and rough and arrogant enough to set Sam's teeth on edge. "To me."

Sam's stomach gave a queasy little flip as one corner of his mind yanked him back toward his body, which was rapidly moving away, while the rest of him tried to remain here, anchored in a lion that didn't seem to want to head the call.

Within seconds, the distance became too much, and Sam returned to the cockpit of Zarkon's Green Lion before he strained something. The indefinable ripple in the air returned, more insistent this time, and Sam realized that this must be Zarkon, exerting his will over his lions. After a moment, his Red Lion finally broke away from the battle, slinking over to the rest of them.

And something _changed._

Sam was an outsider here, he knew. A passenger in the lion, a bystander to whatever connections Haggar had crafted to make herself a new replica of Voltron. For just this moment, though, it didn't feel like he was outside anything. His lion shifted around him, contorting in a way that made his stomach flip. He felt the connections in the air--not connections so much as chains binding them all to Zarkon. Sam lost track of himself, his form fraying at the edges, his mind spreading out through the massive structure Zarkon was building.

There, he found the others. Rolo, frightened and disoriented, latching onto Sam in an instant as they both recognized the other. Rax, huddled in his lion, small and unsure. Sam wanted to hug them, to tell them it was going to be okay, but he had neither arms nor mouth. They seemed to understand his intent, though, and pulled closer, the three of them huddled together against the storm raging around them.

Another mind brushed up against theirs, and for that first instant, Sam thought they might finally have found Ulaz.

But, no. This wasn't Ulaz. This wasn't a mind at all. This was raw fury, untamed violence, a bestial urge to break free, and the chains that bound it were already crumbling.

The storm changed.

The connections flickered.

And Sam pulled Rax and Rolo closer, hoping against hope this battle didn't rip them to shreds.

* * *

Allura's blood ran cold, her breath catching in her throat. She watched, horrified and captivated, as Zarkon's lions came together, blazing with a brilliant light tinted magenta with synthetic Quintessence. Shiro was already calling for the paladins to come together and form Voltron themselves. Allura answered the call by rote, her mind a million miles away.

This wasn't right.

The chill in the air. The flickering shadows at the edges of her vision where the light entered the cockpit. _Zarkon_ , standing at the head of an artificial Voltron made to combat the paladins.

More than that, though, something was _wrong._  The light streaming off the enemy Voltron was uneven, wildly vacillating between extremes, and it left Allura dizzy as the paladins' own transformation began.

* * *

Eleven minds came together, each pulling Voltron in a different direction. Fear for family, fear of what Dark Voltron could do. The need to fight, the need to observe. Unease--unease on multiple levels, all meshing together and strangling the bond.

Allura was more focused than many of them, and the other minds gravitated toward hers, only to balk when they saw what she did.

Something was happening within Dark Voltron. It seemed off-kilter, listing to one side, the light at its joins blazing bright whenever it moved. Was this part of how Haggar had built it? Or had she miscalculated, overlooked some flaw in her design?

Could the paladins use it to their advantage?

The idea hung, breathless, at the forefront of their minds, but Dark Voltron wasn't going to sit around and let them strategize. It leaned forward, lifted its head, and charged, and Allura let her suspicions fade to the background as the battle filled their collective mind. They danced aside as Dark Voltron struck, twisted, Val and Pidge calling for their shield as Keith and Matt extended their sword.

Dark Voltron answered in kind, and their swords crossed, the blow reverberating throughout all of Voltron. Aside from the Vkullor itself, they'd never gone up against something this powerful, something built to match Voltron blow for blow--and the knowledge that their own family and friends were trapped within made their every move just a little more frantic.

Dark Voltron was relentless, seizing on every chip in their guard, sliding into every opening. It moved as one unit, too perfectly in sync. Allura supposed if you simply didn't allow your fellow paladins to retain their own minds, then it was easy to avoid conflict in the bond.

And still, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was deeply, horribly wrong. Dark Voltron's strikes never missed, but they pulled it off balance-- _Dark Red_  pulled it off balance.

The realization spread through the bond, and one by one they all saw it: the way Dark Voltron nearly moved in perfect sync with itself, only to be wrenched off course by an ill-timed strike, an overreach, a reversal the main body wasn't prepared for. They'd felt it in smaller ways, when the paladins were of differing minds on how best to approach a situation, when one wanted to attack, another to play it safe, when someone saw a threat and reacted before the information had permeated the bond.

Momentary slips were dangerous enough on their own.

 _This_  was something else altogether.

It might have been comforting to find such a glaring weakness in their opponent, except that they couldn't take advantage of it. Dark Voltron was too even a match for Voltron themself; whenever they managed to get off a shot, their opponent either dodged the hit or absorbed it easily. In an extended fight, perhaps they could have chipped away at its defenses until they managed to wear it down, but they were just as likely to be worn down themself--and in the mean time, they had Dark Red to worry about.

It was a force all its own, blade flashing in unpredictable patterns, striking for every weakness and every opening. Its movements were so at odds with the other lions that it was impossible to predict its attacks, and impossible to block them because of it. It struck them again and again--solid blows that rattled teeth, glancing blows that split ears with the horrible screech of metal on metal, blows that threw them off balance and opened them up to follow-ups from Dark Voltron's canons.

The more hits they took, the more panic began to take root. No longer were they afraid of hurting the pilots of Zarkon's lions. Now they were afraid of being overwhelmed. Dark Red's attacks so far were missing vital components. They hurt, and the armor was rapidly weakening, but engines, weapons, and shields were all still in working order. Lose any of those, and the battle could take a drastic turn.

It wouldn't come to that.

While Shiro was trying to rally the team, while Pidge was frantically searching for any tell they could use to predict Dark Red's attacks, while Hunk flitted from place to place, analyzing the damage and trying to shore it up, Allura's eyes remained always on Dark Voltron. The bond was rapidly deteriorating, the paladins' minds pulled in too many directions at once, and she nearly missed the moment Zarkon made the fatal mistake.

Dark Red began another attack, as reckless and senseless as the last. Several of the paladins saw it at once, and the team scrambled to respond--to fall back, to parry, to twist and take the hit on their shield instead of the chest. Too many voices, too many ideas. Allura knew she should be helping Shiro to keep them all focused, but her mind had gone silent, wholly fixated on the echo of Zarkon's presence tickling her mind.

She swore she sensed his rage, and Dark Red froze, its sword mere feet away from Voltron, who had seized up from indecision.

Dark Voltron trembled, the magenta glow of Quintessence pulsing at its joints. Zarkon's fury swelled again, and he began to pull Dark Red back, dominating it with his will, bringing it under his sway. It shook, straining against the command, and it brought to mind a dog on a leash, straining for just another inch of freedom while its owner hauled it back.

The leash snapped.

Electric green flashed in Dark Red's eye.

A tremor wracked Dark Voltron's body.

The Quintessence glow flashed bright and blinding, and Voltron recoiled as every paladin shielded their eyes.

Dark Voltron split apart, several of the lions ejected so violently they tumbled uncontrollably through open space.

And a ten-ton projectile slammed into Voltron's center, hitting with all the force of a bolt of thunder and shattering the already precarious bond.

* * *

Allura gasped as her consciousness snapped back into her own body, tight and small and limited after the Voltron bond. She'd fallen without realizing it, landed on hands and knees behind Shiro's chair. He reached out for her mentally even as he twisted to carry them away from Dark Red--that was what had hit them, Allura realized belatedly, hauling herself up on Shiro's chair and commanding her shaking legs to hold her weight. 

"I'm fine," she said, even as she re-centered herself between the pedestals and turned her mind toward the other paladins. All were in the same position as her: shaken, but unharmed.

The way Dark Red was raging about, there was no guarantee it was going to stay that way.

It seemed to have gone feral, tearing from target to target without pause, heedless of any attacks that came its way or the damage it dealt itself as it crashed against the other lions. Before, Allura had worried about the target of Dark Red's wrath, or about its erratic movements causing the paladins to accidentally hit one another.

Now, she wasn't worried about that. Dark Red's frenzy made its attacks less precise, and it was doing more damage to itself than anyone else. It thrashed, twisting at an unnatural angle, and Allura winced as its back leg spasmed.

Zarkon and the rest of him team had pulled back--hovering, for now, at the edge of the battle. Dark Red seemed not to notice that they were there, but Allura saw them, and her blood boiled. Sam, Rax, and Rolo would be watching, powerless, as Zuza's lion flew into a frenzy. Allura's own team buzzed with horror and fear.

The Zarkon Allura had known would have been equally appalled, but the Zarkon before her only turned and led his team away, abandoning the dead weight to destroy itself or be destroyed.

Part of Allura wanted to chase him down, to make him pay. Several of the minds glittering out there among the stars, hanging on the fringes of her awareness, felt the same, and others ached to chase after his other pilots.

Shiro's sorrow resonated in the air, and Allura soothed him at once. She knew. They couldn't afford to divide their focus now.

"Paladins, stay close. We need to stop Dark Red before it tears itself apart."

"But--" Pidge stopped themself there, perhaps sensing the tone of Allura's thoughts.

Shiro sighed, the sound spreading outward to all the paladins as though casting a cloud over every cockpit. "I know you don't want to let them go, but if we don't deal with Dark Red, Zuza _will_ die. And we're going to need all of us to contain that thing. Especially now."

After one last moment during which Allura could feel Pidge listing after their father--Nyma and Shay not far behind--they relented, and every mind turned toward Dark Red. Its rampage wasn't slowing in the least, and Allura winced each time it slammed against another lion. Meri tried to shoot out one of its thrusters--not a bad plan. Slowing down Dark Red would at least limit the amount of damage it could do--both to itself and to the paladins.

But Dark Red twisted at the last moment, and Meri's shot went wide, burning a hole into its back, and Dark Red spun, limping, mouth open in a soundless roar. Blue was too close to dodge the next attack, but Hunk and Shay saw it coming and barreled into it, knocking it aside. Dark Red fought back, teeth and claws flashing, engines blazing bright.

Yellow was stronger, and Dark Red barely managed to halt its backwards progress, straining against Yellow's bulk. One of its engines exploded in a sudden flash that had Shay crying out in surprise and pain, and Dark Red thrashed as it careened away. It's back paw caught on Black's as Shiro moved in to try to subdue it. The shriek of the collision set Allura's teeth on edge, and the gash across Dark Red's leg--and the thruster mounted there--chilled her.

"This isn't working," Allura said. "Shiro--the tractor beam."

Shiro breathed in, alert at once, and he powered up the beam without a word. It was one of Black stranger abilities, and one they'd seldom had use for. Truth be told, Allura wasn't sure how much good it would do them here. But they had to keep Dark Red still if they were going to make any progress, and physically restraining her obviously wasn't getting them anywhere.

The tractor beam caught Dark Red, and it twisted, a beast trying to bite the hand that held it by the neck. Every light in its body flared bright once more, the glow an almost liquid thing that seeped between armor plates and blazed in its eyes. Its remaining thrusters spat jets of raw energy, and the one damaged one sputtered as it tried to keep up. Dark Red tossed it head back and roared, and yet another light began to build in its open maw.

Allura stopped breathing. She felt Shiro's strain in her arms, willed Black to stay strong as Dark Red tried to break her hold. How it was producing so much power--how its body could _contain_  it all--Allura didn't know, but as the other paladins closed in, her pulse spiked.

"Everyone back!" she cried. "Before--"

Dark Red released the laser it had been charging, but Allura's instincts had been right. With so much power pooling in its conduit, with as much damage as it had taken, Dark Red was at its limit. The laser it fired went wide, skimming past Black's head and disappearing into open space. At the same moment, the canon in its jaw burst, shrapnel pinging against Black's shield and startling her and Shiro both into dropping the tractor beam.

Allura caught one last glimpse of Dark Red as it tumbled away, its thrusters finally dark, its eyes flickering, and half its jaw ripped away. The comms burst with anxious chatter, Red chasing after the incapacitated lion with Blue not far behind. She heard them talking about the damage from the last blast, the way the cockpit's seal might have broken from the damage--and did Zarkon's paladins have good enough armor to withstand a vacuum? No one could be sure.

Allura watched it all in a haze, her stomach churning as she watched Dark Red drift through open space, until at last Shay brought Yellow in to hold her still so Keith and Lance could venture inside.

* * *

The atmosphere inside Dark Red was oppressive. Lance stalled out in the mangled entryway, bracing his feet and one hand on the jagged remains of the airlock, which had been blown off when the canon exploded. He held the other hand out in front of him, shining a light on the hollow cockpit. It was dark, only a handful of indicator lights still illuminated--all of them red and flashing in warning.

Lance had his helmet sealed, his external sensors indicating a full vacuum. It wasn't surprising, given the extent of the damage to the cockpit--shredded airlock, buckled floor panels, whole consoles dislodged, broken, and sparking. Somehow, though, Lance expected the air in here to be full of smoke and the stench of super-heated metal.He could almost smell it in the recycled oxygen his suit fed him, and he had to take a moment to settle his stomach.

Keith forged ahead, either unaware of the eerie atmosphere hanging over the place or not caring about it. He kicked off the ramp, drifting out into the center of the cockpit, his own light sweeping the space and giving Lance more snapshots of the destruction. He'd figured the last meltdown had burned out Dark Red's energy core, but even without that, she'd probably have been down for the count.

Lance breathed in once, twice, and followed after Keith. Zuza was in here, somewhere, and she needed help.

(Or, at the very least, she deserved Lance paying his last respects, after she'd sacrificed herself to save Luz.)

He held his breath as he pressed deeper into the cockpit, passing over the guts of a control panel that had exploded across the cockpit floor and now floated in the air like electronic jellyfish in the ocean's currents. Keith caught himself on the pilot's chair, and Lance caught himself on Keith, and they two shared a silent look before Lance swung around in front of the body still strapped to the chair, arms floating lifeless above the controls.

Lance froze, his mind running blank as he stared down at the face visible through the cracked faceplate. It wasn't Zuza, that much was for sure. Whoever it was _was_  Galra, but he didn't have Zuza's small, smooth scales. Rather, his face was covered in a fine lavender fur, thinner and shorter than Keith's, flecked with white that might have been age or might have been his natural color. 

"What is it?"

Keith's voice was small and tinny, too close to Lance's ear. It made him acutely aware of the silence surrounding him, of the space he occupied and the dull, sightless, matte quality to the pilot's eyes.

"Lance?" Shiro's voice this time. Lance must have been quiet too long. Even Keith was starting to look nervous, and he finally came around to see what it was Lance had found.

At once, Keith stiffened. "This isn't Zuza," he said, surprise making his words flat. A chorus of confused whispers echoed on the comms, a dozen gnats buzzing in Lance's ears. "He's Galra, whoever he is, but I don't recognize him."

"One of Zarkon's officers, maybe?" Matt said. "Someone who volunteered for the job."

Lance wasn't sure why anyone would volunteer for _this_ , but he didn't say anything. Didn't have the chance. Meri and Nyma's voices faded behind the rest, a short, clipped exchange that ended with the hiss of depressurization.

"I'm coming in," Meri said.

"What?" Lance looked up as new light shone through the opening at the back of the cockpit. "Okay, I guess..."

She seemed shaken by the time she entered, kicking across the cockpit with too much force, only grunting when Lance helped to stabilize her. She gripped his arm, and her hand turned into a vice when she finally turned her gaze toward the pilot.

"It's Ulaz," she whispered, soft and horrified. "He's dead."

* * *

They left no trace of Dark Red behind. After retrieving Ulaz's body, the paladins formed Voltron once more to drag the lion's mangled corpse to the nearest star and cast it into the inferno. They stayed there, standing vigil over the lonely star, until they could no longer detect Dark Red or any of its Quintessence on their scanners.

Then they waited another thirty minutes, just to be sure. Haggar might be able to build another from scratch, but they wouldn't give her a leg up by leaving the first model for her to salvage for parts.

Hopefully they'd have put an end to Vindication once and for all before she completed the second model.

Once the deed was done, they returned to the castle-ship, where they found Thace keeping watch over the body.

Meri's heart ached for him as much as it ached for Ulaz's fate. She'd met him only a few times, but he'd helped her time and again, and put himself at risk to do so every time.

And then she'd gone and blown her cover. She'd known Keturah would be able to trace her back to Dez and Ulaz. She'd tried to warn them.

She should have done more.

"I'm sorry," Meri said, blinking back tears as she took a seat beside Thace. Coran had brought Ulaz to the infirmary attached to the pod room, laid him on one of the beds here, cleaned the blood from his face, draped a blanket across his body so they didn't have to look at the wounds. "This is my fau--"

Thace laid his hand over hers and squeezed her fingers to quiet her. "You can't think like that, Meri," he said, his voice rough. "We all know the risks involved in this line of work."

She shook her head, the guilt expanding in her chest until she felt she would burst. "But I'm the one who got caught. Keturah must have seen Ulaz in my head--that's why she went after him."

"No." Thace pulled out a small comms unit--not one of the castle's, but something more easily concealed. "I sent word to Dez. Thought she deserved to know what had happened. She didn't sound surprised. It seems Ulaz went and landed himself a position on the Vindication team a few weeks ago. He wouldn't let Dez talk him out of it."

Meri stared at him, his words slow to process. "What? But--I _told_ them what happened. I told them they were in danger! Why would he...?"

Thace only smiled, and Meri's heart sank still further. He'd done it for the paladins. He'd done it in a desperate bid to bring their families to safety. He had to have known how dangerous it was, but he'd gone anyway, and now... Now he was dead, and all Meri could do for him was remember him.

Stars knew no one beyond the castle's walls would.

* * *

They delayed the funeral only long enough for one of the castle's surgeons to remove the device embedded in Ulaz's skull--the same thing, according to Pidge, that had been attached to Sam Holt, which meant it was likely Rax and Rolo each had one, too. Meri could see how Pidge struggled with the request--afraid to be disrespectful to the dead but desperate for something that might help bring the others home safely.

Thace was the first to voice his agreement with Pidge's suggestion. _Ulaz knew the value of information,_  he'd said, still with that stiff upper lip like he could fool himself into not drowning in his grief. _He would be glad to know he'd brought us something useful, even in death._

No one else was going to argue after that--but no one else wanted to see. It was just Meri and Thace, then, outside the surgical suite until the surgeon emerged with the device, a long, curved spike. Meri didn't need the woman's confirmation to know that they couldn't hope to remove it in the field. They would either need to disable the control system or subdue the mind-controlled prisoners so they could attempt a removal under more controlled conditions.

It made her sick to her stomach to think about how this thing had been implanted, but she couldn't make herself stop. Ulaz had suffered alone in the weeks before his death, and however much Thace tried to tell her that it wasn't her fault, it didn't stop the guilt from spiraling higher.

The funeral itself was small--just Thace, the paladins and adjuncts, and the delegation from New Altea gathering in a small room near the infirmary to pay their respects. Yvis, the historian Meri had met on her first trip to New Altea, had returned to the castle-ship as part of the delegation. Ze was quiet and solemn when the delegation first arrived, but it wasn't the awkward silence of politicians who knew they had to at least pretend to honor a person most of them had never even heard of. Yvis's silence was more thoughtful than that, and perhaps more pointed, judging by the way ze stood at a distance from the rest of the delegation, who spoke in low tones as the last few mourners trickled in.

They kept darting glances at Ulaz where he lay in a stasis chamber, a small crystal pendant resting on his sternum, the chain looped around his folded hands.

“The Light of Altea,” Thace whispered.

Meri glanced at him. “What?”

He nodded toward Ulaz. “That pendant. It’s tradition on New Altea.”

He said no more than that, but it painted the delegation's furtive conversation in a new light, and Meri resisted the urge to glare at them. Was that what they were whispering about? Debating whether or not Ulaz deserved their tradition? He'd been born on New Altea, but he'd spent most of his adult life in the Accords, fighting from inside the Empire, alongside _asothra_ like Thace and Dez.

Thace spoke a few words--only a few, carefully skirting the details of Ulaz’s service but praising his character. When he finished, Yvis was the first to step forward, touching a finger to the crystal pendant resting atop Ulaz's chest. Ze closed hir eyes and breathed, and the hair on the back of Meri’s neck stood on end as the Quintessence in the room stirred. A tiny mote of light burned inside the crystal when Yvis stepped away, so small it almost passed for a reflection.

“The crystal holds our Quintessence,” Yvis explained quietly as ze rejoined Meri and Thace in the ring of mourners. The rest of the delegation followed hir example, approaching Ulaz and touching the crystal. The light grew with each repetition, burning a warm and steady blue against his skin. “We cremate our dead on New Altea, and the Light of Altea forms the centerpiece of their memorial--a light shining for the rest of time as testament to the lives they touched.”

Thace’s mouth tightened, and Meri wondered what it was he wasn’t saying. He avoided her gaze, though, and added his light to the crystal when his turn came, his eyes old and his face stoic.

Then it was Meri’s turn, and she willed the light to blaze as bright as a sun in honor of everything Ulaz had done for her.

* * *

Keena lingered after the memorial, ignoring the other members of the delegation as they filed out. She stared at Ulaz's shouded body for a long moment, her face giving nothing away. Meri wanted to reach out and shake the woman.

"Do you even care that he's dead?"

Maybe it was stupid of her to pick a fight right now, to pick a fight with Keena at all. Maybe she was pulling too much from the Voltron bond. Keith and Matt both hated the woman (Matt more adamantly than Keith), and for some reason when they'd returned to the castle after disposing of Dark Red and found Keena among the welcoming party, the Reds' combined knee-jerk response was so potent it triggered something sympathetic inside Meri.

Besides, Ulaz had been a friend, however briefly she'd known him. It irked her to see Keena going through the motions of mourning.

Keena turned, something dangerous in her gaze as it found Meri. "Of course I care. He was a good agent. We don't have many of those left."

"He was a good _man_ ," Meri shot back. "However useful he was or wasn't to your plan."

Thace's hand closed around her elbow, and Allura looked up from where she was conferring with Coran. Meri ignored them both.

"Of course." Keena's voice dripped with patronizing almost-sympathy. "He will be missed."

Meri should have dropped it there. Should have walked away and let Keena go on being Keena. Wasn't like arguing with her was ever going to change her, and the best thing to do was ignore her as much as possible--but Meri's stomach was knotted up, her nerves frayed, her emotions bursting into being like fireworks, blazing bright and spurring her into motion in an instant.

"Why are you even here, Keena? You didn't care about Ulaz. You didn't even know him apart from anyone else who does your dirty work."

Keena's expression darkened, her voice lowering to just above a growl. "Don't pretend you know me."

"I don't have to know you. If you'd cared at all about Ulaz, he wouldn't be out there throwing his life away so that you could climb the political ladder."

"We're fighting a war, paladin," Keena hissed. "Have you forgotten that? I don't have the luxury of keeping my agents out of danger. They knew what they were getting into. They volunteered for the job. I respect them enough to let them do it, and I care enough to give them the training and the resources they need to do it well. And it hurts when some untrained firebrand comes in and throws caution to the wind because she thinks she's too good for protocol, because people like that get people like Ulaz killed."

Meri didn't register taking a step back, only that, suddenly, there was enough room for Coran to step between her and Keena, whose expression was just as coolly neutral as ever.

"Perhaps you ought to excuse yourself now," he told Keena, the steel in his voice saying it wasn't a suggestion. Keena narrowed her eyes, glancing from Coran to Meri to Thace, Allura, Shiro--all of whom were still in the room, and all watching the showdown. Meri saw the moment Keena realized she was fighting a losing battle; she rolled her shoulders, shook her hair out of her eyes, and turned toward the door.

"Perhaps you're right," she said. "What's done is done. We need to focus on the future now."

She swept out of the room, leaving a heavy silence in her wake. Meri spun around on the spot, shrugging off Coran's outstretched hand, and dug her thumbs into her eyes to try to stem the flood of tears. She waited through several pounding heartbeats, holding her breath for fear that the next one would carry a sob, but as Allura's skirts rustled, Meri's name escaping on a whisper, Meri knew she couldn't stay here and hope to keep it together.

She hurried toward the door, praying Keena hadn't lingered near this room. The hall was blessedly empty, only the sound of Meri's own footsteps echoing back at her off the walls. She made it to the first cross-corridor before she stalled out, a storm of anger, grief, and regrets swirling around her. She didn't know where to go, or how to make it all stop beating at the inside of her skull like a demon trying to break free.

Soft footsteps approached from the direction of the memorial hall, and Meri covered her face with her hands.

"Go away, Allura. I need to be alone right now."

"If that's the truth," Thace said, his voice soft with sympathy that was infinitely more genuine than his sister's, "then I'll go." He paused, and when Meri finally lowered her hands, she found him waiting just outside arm's reach, his head ducked to catch her eye. "But it seems to me that perhaps what you need is someone who's been where you are."

Meri choked on a laugh, turning her head away from that too-kind gaze. "You're telling me you know what it's like to get a friend killed through your own incompetence?"

"Yes."

The simple response brought Meri up short, and she looked back at Thace--really _looked_  at him this time. His eyes shone with unshed tears, the first she'd ever seen from him, and he'd wrapped his arms around himself in a defensive posture that made him look too vulnerable for the veteran spy she'd come to know.

"I was young, once," he said, apparently taking her silence as approval to continue. "Young, reckless, and inexperienced. I flubbed a fair few missions in those early years--minor ones, to be sure, but eventually one of them ended with a friend and ally dead. I spent the next week running through the mission over and over in my mind, obsessing over everything I could have done differently that might have saved his life. That feeling never goes away, you know. I grew older, I learned how to minimize the risks. But there are always things you can't account for--surprises, freak accidents, failures on the part of other agents and shrewd moves on the part of the enemy. People still die, and even when I performed my role flawlessly, there's always room to wonder if I couldn't have done it better. If I could have talked Ulaz out of this plan, had I still been in the field."

Meri ducked her head, feeling suddenly small. "I'm sorry. For--" She shook her head, scrubbing at the tears that were still trying to fall. "You knew Ulaz better than I ever did. You shouldn't have to comfort me about all this."

He sighed. "That's not how grief works, Meri. No one deserves to mourn more or less than anyone else. All we can do is try to help each other where we can."

Meri's lips twitched into a lopsided smile. "Seems to me like you're the one doing most of the helping here."

"In this moment," he said. "Give it time, and I'm sure the balance will swing the other way. Shall I leave you alone now, or would you like some company? I could make you some tea."

She still wasn't sure she actually wanted to be around people, but Thace was right about one thing: they understood each other in a way the others couldn't. If he wanted the company, she figured the least she could do was oblige him.

She smiled, letting her arms fall to her side. "Tea sounds nice."

* * *

"You promised me this would work."

Haggar grit her teeth, pointedly refusing to reward Zarkon with her full attention. "What I promised was that I am capable of building a new Voltron to serve you. I told you not to rush me."

There was a crash as Zarkon swept notes, flasks, canisters, and computer off one of the benches that lined Haggar's personal lab. The tinkle of shattered glass, of ruined work, of wasted time, grated on her nerves, but she held onto her composure by the tips of her claws.

"You had better hope you didn't just ruin something irreplaceable," she hissed, reaching out for a vial of crystallized Quintessence that sat on a rack beside half a dozen others.

Zarkon's fingers dug into her shoulders, claws threatening to break the skin as he spun her around. "I am your Emperor, Haggar. You will look at me when I am speaking and address me with respect."

Haggar's lips curled back. "You're still the petulant child you always were."

"How _dare_ you--" He raised a hand to backhand her, but Haggar stopped him with a flick of her wrist. Cords of Quintessence tightened around him, _within_  him, halting him in place.

"Don't forget who it was who granted you eternal life, _Emperor_  Zarkon." She let every ounce of disdain in her body ooze into the title and smiled as Zarkon's eye twitched. "All your power, all your authority, everything you are... It would have crumbled eons ago without me. If I choose to revoke my gift, it will all crumble to dust before you can call your armies to action."

He glared at her, not saying a word, and Haggar met him glare for glare. It was a dangerous game they played, the same one they'd played for ten thousand years. Haggar's magic had made Zarkon what he was, and it could rip it all away in a flash. But Zarkon sat on the throne, commanded the loyalty of his officers and governors. They might fear Haggar and her druids, but they would turn on her in a heartbeat if Zarkon commanded it--and if he caught her by surprise, he could kill her as easily as any prisoner in his cells.

She waited until the growl haunting Zarkon's breath petered out, then release her hold on him. He stance relaxed, and he curled his lip as though contemplating retribution before he straightened and proceeded as though nothing had happened.

Good. Then he hadn't forgotten which of them outclassed the other.

"The paladins grow stronger every day," he said, turning to pace the room. "My armies cannot stand against their might. Your robeasts are no better. We _need_  the lions, or we will continue to lose territory."

Haggar's gut clenched at his words. Likely he didn't even hear himself, or what his words seemed to imply. The insult was far too subtle for Zarkon's usual tact. "You will have the lions. The Vkullor's Quintessence merely proved too unstable. If we'd had more time to properly tame it--"

"You can use what you learned today?" he asked, insistent, and Haggar hesitated.

"We could... But there wasn't enough Quintessence in the egg for two lions. There is still the other prototype," she added, before Zarkon's rage swept him away.

Her words only chilled it, however. Rather than throw another tantrum, he swiveled toward her, his mouth set in a grim line. "I told you no once before."

"Unless you want to wait another half a year for me to find a Destroyer and extract its Quintessence..."

He growled, stepping forward until he towered over her. If he thought he could cow her by doing so, however, then he didn't know her as well as he should have after millennia of ruling together. "Use it, then," he said. "But you will find another pilot. I made the mistake of trusting you once before. I won't make it again."

Helpless rage seethed beneath her skin. Not because she'd lost his trust--he was very much correct on that point. Haggar's loyalty to Zarkon had withered and died generations ago. If anything, he already trusted her too much.

No, it was the denial that stung. After centuries of work, she finally had one chance to fix her greatest failing, to fly again as a paladin, in command of a Voltron Lion--the greatest weapons ever devised. And she _would_ command it this time. No sullen, rebellious mind would turn her away again.

And Zarkon still forbid it.

"Find someone else," Zarkon said, jabbing his claw into her shoulder to drive the point home. "Or I'll find someone to replace _you_."

He swept from the room, leaving Haggar behind, trembling with rage.

* * *

Akira's head was pounding.

He'd lost himself again, briefly, during the battle. One moment he was on the bridge, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Karen and the other adjuncts, watching the battle and waiting for the moment something changed. He wanted to send out the Guard--to go out there himself--danger be damned.

Then, suddenly, the battle was over, and Akira was left wondering how it could have happened so quickly.

The rumble in the back of his mind and the accompanying flush of shame, just before a door slammed shut, told him all he needed to know.

Red.

_Again._

He looked around the bridge, wondering if he'd done anything to give himself away this time, but it didn't seem like it. He hadn't left, as he would have expected. Red always seemed to want to take him somewhere when she possessed him like this--to her paladins, toward danger, to her own hangar.

He wasn't honestly sure _why_  she'd taken him over this time, then, when it seemed all she'd done was watch the battle through his eyes. Did she even know she was doing it? He'd never been able to get a straight answer out of her; not one he could understand. But he didn't want to ask Keith and Matt. He would only worry them if he told them that this was happening more and more often.

Karen watched him with a slight puckering of her brow, concern plain in her eyes. Akira squirmed under that look and did his best to ignore it. He didn't think Karen's adjunct bond would let her know what was happening with Akira, not in any detail, but he'd rather not take that chance.

He excused himself the first chance he got, all but running from the bridge. He wandered for a while after that, crossing his arms and digging his nails into his skin to keep himself grounded. He was here, and he was himself, and Red wasn't going to take over again so long as he stayed mindful of himself.

He didn't know how long he spent pacing the seldom-used corridors of the upper stretches of Red Tower; he deliberately didn't check his watch, because he knew it wouldn't help. He didn't need time away from the others; he just needed to stop feeling like a stranger in his own skin.

Slowly, the ill-fitting feeling faded, leaving Akira tired, shaky, and the kind of hungry that felt more like hollowness. He stepped into a bathroom before leaving Red Tower, splashing water on his face and trying to erase all outward signs of this latest scare.

He found the kitchens deserted and, bewildered, reached for his comm to check the time.

It was late--later than the team usually would have eaten, if not for the battle against Dark Voltron--but that wasn't what caught Akira's eye. He had several unread messages from Shiro, Matt, and Karen, all informing him of a memorial service for Ulaz. (Right. They'd found Ulaz inside Dark Red. Akira had heard that report shortly before he fled the bridge.)

It was a quick turn-around on the memorial; Akira had been gone less than three hours and he'd already missed the start of it. He supposed that was the reality of war, though. You couldn't wait on things like this. If they planned the memorial for tomorrow, who knew what new crisis might interrupt it.

Akira briefly considered going down to the memorial anyway, catching the end of it, at least, but he figured the interruption would detract more than his presence would add. He'd pay his respects later.

His appetite was well and truly ruined by this point, but he grabbed a ration bar on his way out anyway. He could force down a few bites for the sake of getting some calories in him if he had to.

His feet carried him back, eventually, to the residential floors, though not to the one where the paladins had their rooms. The last thing Akira wanted right now was to run across a worried Keith or Matt--or worse, a worried Takashi.

Only slightly better, he instead ran into Allura, whose worry, at least, didn't seem to be directed at Akira.

"Everything all right?" Akira asked, stopping himself from sprinting away as he very much wanted to do. Allura was chewing on her thumbnail, something Akira had never seen her do, and it took her a moment to realize Akira had spoken.

"What?" She turned toward him, blinking, her thumbnail still caught between her teeth. Suddenly she stiffened, dropping her hand to her side. "Fine." She paused, frowned. "Are _you_  all right? I haven't seen you since the battle."

He smiled, hoping Allura was distracted enough not to see how fake it was. "A little shaken up is all. Sorry I wasn't at the memorial. I just..." He waved a hand vaguely, unable to come up with an excuse that didn't sound completely dickish.

Allura, though, only smiled. "It's all right, Akira. I understand."

 _I very much doubt that,_  Akira thought, but he only smiled again, with a little more conviction this time. "What brings you down here?"

She bit her lip, rubbing her thumbnail at the same moment, like she wanted very much to go back to biting it. "Nothing. I was just leaving."

Akira raised an eyebrow, his gaze darting past Allura to the closed door through which he could hear the faint murmur of voices. "Thace?" he asked, squinting at the hallway and trying to orient himself. "No... Meri's in there, isn't she?"

Allura flinched, looking for all the world like she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. "She took Ulaz's death hard. He helped her while she was off spying for us. I know Thace can sympathize more than I can, but even so..."

"You want to be there for her," he said, already nodding. "Nothing wrong with that."

She glanced away, and Akira rolled his eyes, brushing past Allura and knocking on Thace's door. Allura _eeped_  in surprise and protest, grabbing onto Akira's arm as the voices inside the room fell silent. A moment later, the door opened, revealing Thace. He looked less severe out of uniform, but there was no disguising the danger in his stance.

He relaxed only slightly when he saw who his visitors were. "Princess Allura. Commander Shirogane. What brings you here?"

"Just wanted to check in on Meri," Akira said, making his words as bright as possible. "I don't suppose you two are up for a little more company?"

Thace glanced over his shoulder at Meri, whose gaunt face, puffy eyes, and frazzled hair certainly justified Allura's concern. She hesitated, sighed, then knocked back the tea cup in her hand. "Oh, all right," she said, wiping her mouth. She set the cup aside, and waved for Akira and Allura to come in. "I'm fine, you know. You don't need to worry about me all the time."

"Someone has to," Akira shot back, sticking his tongue out for good measure. Meri mimicked the gesture, and Akira grinned, the tightness in his chest loosening. He sat down on the opposite end of the couch Meri had claimed, Allura taking the center seat. Meri turned sideways, flinging her legs over the arm of the couch and flopping across Allura's lap.

"We just wanted to keep you company," Allura said. "Both of you." It sounded like the afterthought it probably was, but Thace didn't seem to mind. "I didn't know Ulaz personally, but I can see how much of an impression he made on both of you. How much you trusted him. How much you cared."

"He was a valuable ally," Thace said, staring into his tea. "A good friend, from when I seldom presumed to call _anyone_  a friend."

Meri watched him, her eyes sad. "It's a lonely job," she said, and Akira doubted she was talking only about Ulaz. Thace refused to meet her eye, and Allura slid her hand down Meri's arm to her hand, interlacing their fingers.

A heavy silence settled over the room, and Akira let it stretch for a few moments, conscious that Meri and Thace had just lost a friend. Eventually, though, he couldn't help it. Silence grated on his nerves, somber silence more than most. He grabbed a lock of Meri's hair and used it to tickle her nose, which wrinkled in distaste as she reached up to swat at his hands.

"Stop thinking so much," he told her.

She scoffed. "What does that even mean?"

"It means I can hear the wheels in your head spinning from here. You're not going to make yourself feel better if you obsess over everything you could have done different."

Meri's gaze slid aside, which was as good as admitting Akira had hit it on the nose. "I just want to be ready for next time."

"There won't be a next time," Akira said.

Allura squeezed her hand. "And even if there is, it will be different. You're here with us, and we're learning more about Zarkon and Keturah's plans every day. We'll do better next time--together."

Meri's eyes watered, her lips trembling, and she let out a feeble laugh as she flung an arm across her face. "You guys are so cheesy sometimes," she mumbled.

Akira laughed, and Allura wove her fingers into Meri's hair, and across from them, Thace sipped his tea and smiled.

* * *

Days passed, and life moved on. Thace resumed his efforts to identify patterns in the Empire's movements, and continued to do his best to ignore Keena's subtle hints that she had another job for him.

...Some were subtle. Others, not so much.

Ulaz's body left on the next shuttle for New Altea, and Thace was there to see it off, as were most of the paladins. He'd never mourned a fallen agent before. Not like this. Death was part of the job, and they all knew it would come for them one day. It was unfortunate when someone died, it meant you had to be on your guard, lest their work be traced to you, but there was no time to mourn, in the field.

He had the time to mourn now, but he found he didn't know how to do it.

Mostly, he kept to himself. Coran had a tendency to start to worry if he noticed anyone around him was feeling down, and ever since becoming the blue adjunct, he'd developed an uncanny knack for noticing things like that, no matter how Thace tried to hide it. And Coran had more than enough to deal with these days without Thace adding to that list. The Lions needed repairs after the run-in with Dark Voltron, and although Coran still had to keep the castle running and connect with the Coalition on the subject of the war, he never had found anyone he trusted to take charge of the Lions' repairs, except perhaps Hunk (who himself was still spending most of his time on Metos rebuilding after the Vkullor attack.)

So Thace kept out of the way. Most of his work was digital anyway, and he had access to all the files he needed in the archive room he'd claimed as his personal work space, and aside from when he passed someone in the hall or occasionally ventured out in search of a meal, he mostly didn't see anyone for the days following Ulaz's death. He thought of checking in on Meri, but the few times he caught sight of her, in the kitchens or hallways, she was with Allura, Akira, the Mendozas, or some combination thereof. She seemed happier than she had in the immediate aftermath. More grounded.

Thace was, too, he thought. It was a difficult thing to gauge, considering _happiness_  wasn't something he paid any particular mind on an average day. His head was clear, his focus tight. He was able to perform the job assigned to him and get sufficient sleep each night. As long as all of that was true, he had no grounds to complain, and no one else on the castle-ship had grounds for concern.

So it came as a surprise, late in the evening of the fourth day, when someone knocked tentatively on his study room door.

Thace glanced at the time and rubbed his aching eyes. He'd been at it for nearly twelve hours, and he was starting to feel it. Perhaps it was time he called it a night.

He saved the memo he'd been working on and switched off his tablet before standing and heading for the door. His visitor hadn't knocked a second time, and Thace almost thought he'd imagined it--but when he opened the door, he found Keith standing outside, hands in his pockets and weight shifting from side to side.

He froze under the weight of Thace's gaze, his ears instantly trying to tremble.

"Keith," Thace said mildly. "What brings you here?"

Keith shrugged, the motion jerky. "Nothing. Hadn't seen you in a few days."

Thace arched an eyebrow. There was no denying that Keith's observation was true; however, it wasn't particularly worth noting, in Thace's opinion. Aside from the months they'd spent together on the homeworld, their paths didn't cross often. Thace usually saw Keith two or three times in a week, mostly in passing. They were both busy, and they'd never been particularly close.

"Ah," was all Thace said.

Keith wrinkled his nose. " _Vrekt_ , no. I mean. Are you okay? I know... Ulaz was a friend of yours, wasn't he?"

Hearing his name still brought a twinge of pain. Thace thought he masked it well, but Keith muttered another curse and took a step back.

"Sorry." He wrapped his arms around himself and glanced over his shoulder. "We all have the night free, for once. Hunk and Shay are taking a break from reconstruction, now that things are... better, I guess. There aren't any new distress calls or anything, and the Coalition most has the existing ones covered. So we're taking a night off. Hunk's moms made snacks, and Coran has some Altean game he wants to play. I'm sure no one would mind if you joined us."

Emotion caught Thace by surprise, halting a refusal on his tongue. He floundered for a moment, momentarily dizzied by the notion that Keith was right. He was friendly with almost everyone in that circle, and he was _friends_  with a small handful.

He was so used to self-imposed isolation that the idea that he didn't have to be alone baffled him.

Keith looked up, his eyes searching Thace's face. "You don't have to," he said. "I just thought..." He shrugged, looking away again. "I'm no good at the whole offering comfort thing, but it helps having people around. It helps me, anyway."

He was wrong about not being good at comfort. It was shy, and perhaps a bit awkward, but he was _here,_ and his earnest concern warmed Thace's heart. He smiled, reaching out to lay a hand on Keith's arm.

"Thank you," he said. "I think I'll take you up on that offer."

* * *

Haggar stood on the bridge of her personal cruiser, hands hanging loose at her side, her cloak's hood pushed back for once. She still wore her partial Galra shift, the one she'd adopted so long ago--purple skin, yellow eyes, sharpened canines. Her Altean form showed through only in her smooth skin, slender ears, and the crimson _glaes_ that framed her eyes. This form had become such a part of her that she doubted she could have dropped it now without sustained focus--much as she couldn't think of herself as Keturah.

That woman was dead. She was Haggar now, High Prince of the Empire, Chief Druid. Zarkon's Right Hand. The most powerful individual in the universe.

Her crew stared at her while trying not to let her see that they were staring. It was rare that they saw her face without the hood to hide her ears and obscure her face. She wondered, idly, if they thought _Altean_  when they saw her. A few years ago, surely not, but the surviving Alteans had played a more visible role in the war this last year, and Haggar's personal crew had to have been paying attention. Did they suspect the truth about Zarkon's Hand?

It didn't matter much, truth be told. Haggar's authority could not be called into question, and her raw power could make up for any gap in her reputation. It didn't matter whether the one who wore these robes was Galra, Altean, or human.

The air crackled with anxious energy as the shuttle approached its destination. Crew members shifted in their seats. The engines idled for a moment before they began their approach.

Haggar breathed in, an unexpected pang of nostalgia shooting through her at the sight of the Castle of Lions ahead. She'd been peripherally aware of her AI since connecting with it last year. At times, she'd fully inhabited it to ensure everything went to plan.

But projecting her mind into the castle's computer systems was not the same as seeing the castle itself swell to fill her field of vision. It felt something like coming home, something Haggar hadn't felt, hadn't _needed_  to feel, in generations. She quashed it now, tucking it away with the other unwelcome gifts she'd received from the AI while their minds were entangled. Homesickness, grief, _guilt_. Such things were useless to Haggar, the relics of a weaker life.

Muscle memory had Haggar inputting the old code to open the Red Lion's hangar door before she stopped herself and reminded herself of the plan. She curled her lip and cancelled the command, then entered the code she'd had her AI plant in the system early. It opened the door to a smaller hangar, less centrally located. Located in the upper reaches of Red Tower, it was unused, the rooms around it mostly forgotten.

Her shuttle slid silently into the waiting space, settling down without a sound as the doors slid closed behind it. Haggar allowed herself a smile, then turned and headed for the ramp. Two druids, some of her most skilled apprentices, waited at the back of the cockpit, and Haggar indicated them with a twitch of her fingers.

"You. With me. Everyone else, be ready to leave on my command."

A chorus of acknowledgement chased her out of the cockpit, and her pulse pounded as she left her ship behind. The familiar hum of Altean engineering swallowed her, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost feel an echo of the Red Lion's voice.

Her druids hung back as Haggar crossed the hangar to the computer terminal by the door. Her old credentials had been revoked--small surprise--but the emergency address system required no particular clearance, and it would serve Haggar's purpose just fine. She depressed the button and leaned in close, reveling in the thrum of her voice filling the quiet air.

"Greetings, Paladins of Voltron," she began, the adrenaline buzzing in her veins. She let the words hang, imagining the fear that must even now be taking root all across the castle and its inhabitants. "I think it's time we have a little chat."


	13. The Paladin Bond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Voltron and Dark Voltron crossed blades for the first time, but the Vkullor at the core of Dark Red proved untameable. It tore Dark Voltron apart, then tore itself apart, killing Ulaz, its pilot, in the process. The paladins destroyed what remained of Dark Red and held a memorial service for Ulaz. Zarkon, meanwhile, was not happy with Haggar and demanded she give him a new Dark Red immediately. Now she's come to the Castle of Lions and has demanded the paladins come to her for "a chat."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: violence, major character injury, mind control, and suicidal imagery/intent. It's worth noting that no one actually dies in this chapter, but this is a heavy chapter. You can read a summary of this chapter [here,](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONOvacvwBb13SZO3-sMtCbQzVEHWP0ej1oHgh7janDQ/edit?usp=sharing) (contains spoilers for this chapter, but as part of that, it lays out in nongraphic terms the parts of the chapter that may trigger you.) Alternatively, you can read [this note](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IadLrYQBpwBJR90Ql5S7wJwriVcHtqYvoYxY5XlgyG8/edit?usp=sharing), which provides more details on the two parts of the chapter that may be triggering without any more spoilers than necessary, and additionally tells you which parts to skip.

“Greetings, paladins of Voltron. I think it’s time we had a little chat.”

Keturah's voice hung in the air, suspended like glittering crystals. Allura was already on her feet before she knew it, her breath going stale in her lungs as fury and fear battled for dominance. Shiro was beside her in an instant, rigid, his face stone-hard and emotionless.

"Haggar," he hissed, staring at nothing before wrenching his eyes to Allura. "How did she get in the castle?"

"I don't know." Allura turned, searching the bridge for Coran. The rest of his crew had frozen, just as Shiro and Allura had, work forgotten in the face of a new threat. Coran, though, was a blur of motion, his attention divided among three screens.

"She's in the old trade hangar in Red Tower," he said. "It looks like she only brought the one ship, but I wouldn't trust that."

Allura tamped down on the fear and the fury, letting them fuel a fire in her chest but clearing her mind. She couldn't afford to be emotional when going up against the most dangerous enemy they'd ever known. (Who was she kidding? This was _Keturah_. Allura was never going to be able to face her without remembering her betrayal.)

"Keep looking," she told Coran. "Let us know if you find anything else." She settled her helmet over her head, glad that she'd planned today as paladin business rather than diplomatic because it meant she was already in her armor, as was Shiro. "Paladins," she called, hoping desperately that the others were also already in armor. It was early enough that no one had been given an assignment yet, but they must have expected something. There was always more work to do--

"We're here," Matt said, breathless with the same nameless emotion as was closing in around Allura's chest. "What's happening?"

"That was Haggar, right?" Hunk, his voice somewhat muffled, like his helmet wasn't on properly.

"It was." Shiro pulled ahead of Allura, hitting the door controls and leading the way out into the hallway. "Coran's tracked her location to a hangar in Red Tower. We're headed there now. Status report."

Hunk relayed the words to someone else in the room, and a hum of voices answered.

"Just coming off the training deck with Keith," Matt said. "We'll meet you there."

"Getting my armor," Hunk said. "Pidge and I were working on Green, so it'll take us a minute. Shay and Val are with us."

Shiro nodded, stepping into the elevator and hitting the button for the nineteenth floor. "Get there as quick as you can. Keith, Matt, we'll go in together. Anyone heard from Lance, Meri, or Nyma?"

"Sorry," Lance said. "We're here. We were helping out with the new arrivals from Veldth. Took a while to get away without inciting a panic. We'll be there as soon as we can."

It was all they could ask for, but Allura's pulse was still fluttering with fear as the elevator let them out on the nineteenth floor. She didn't look at Shiro as they both took off at a sprint, crossing the bridge to Red Tower and taking the elevator down another three floors. Keith and Matt came careening around a corner just as they stepped out of the elevator, and Allura pulled her staff from its clip at the small of her back, activating it as she struggled to bring her breathing under control.

"Akira's on his way," Matt said. He'd already summoned his bayard, and Keith's claws drummed out a restless beat on the hilt of his sword.

Shiro nodded. "All right. Once we go in there, we stall for as long as possible. If Haggar forces a fight, stay on the defensive until the others get here. She's bound to have backup, and we'll need all our strength to beat her."

None of them needed the reminder, but Allura didn't begrudge Shiro for giving it. They were all on edge, and all fighting to maintain a level head.

Keturah was here. Inside the castle--in their _home_. Allura couldn't stop thinking about that. Hadn't she done enough damage when she was just an AI? Allura's mother had sacrificed herself to get rid of Keturah's influence, and now here she was again, strolling in like she belonged here, like she hadn't burned those bridges when she killed Lealle.

"Let's go," Allura said, keeping an iron grip on her emotions as she led the others down the last stretch of hallway to the hangar in question. She pressed a button on her gauntlet, activating a beacon for the other paladins to follow. The door to the hangar came into view ahead, and Allura held her breath as she approached. It had been less than five minutes since Keturah's message, but five minutes was a long time for someone like that. What was to say she hadn't gone somewhere else to wreak her havoc?

But Keturah was there when Allura opened the door, just waiting, like she really had come here just to talk. She leaned against one of the booths lined up across the hangar a few feet from the door--customs stations and security booths, from back when the Castle of Lions had done a healthy amount of intergalactic trade.

They were deserted now, of course; what trade the castle did now wasn't taxed, and shipments came so infrequently that it made no sense to have stations set up for inspections. They used the open hangars in the lower levels almost exclusively now, for convenience more than anything.

This space, designed to house a dozen merchant vessels at any given time, dwarfed the single shuttle Keturah had brought with her--a small thing whose crew probably didn't exceed five or six. Perhaps an additional dozen passengers might have fit within, though it wouldn't have been comfortable.

Keturah didn't seem to have brought that many. Two druids flanked the ramp leading up into the ship, hoods up and masks on. They might as well have been statues for all the interest they showed in the paladins' arrival.

Keturah herself was hardly more enthused. She stayed where she was, leaning back against a customs booth, her arms crossed over her chest. Her hood was down, for once, giving Allura a perfect view of the woman's face. It wasn't quite the face she remembered--tinted violet now, with Galra eyes and _glaes_  that had bled until they looked more like open wounds cut into her flesh than Allura's own markings.

Allura wondered how much of that was a shift, carefully calculated to manage the impression she gave to the rest of the Empire, and how much was the result of the twisted magic she'd used to extend her life fifteen times beyond a normal Altean lifespan.

Keturah's lips quirked into a smile. "Well, that was quick."

"What do you want?" Shiro asked, his voice the icy cool that Allura knew too well. This wasn't a calm Shiro; this was Shiro furious almost to the point of bursting. His hands were fists at his side, his eyes burning with disgust as he watched Keturah for any sign of an attack. Allura shifted closer to him. (To keep him calm, she told herself, and not because she was moments away from trying to strangle Keturah with her bare hands.) "Why are you here?"

Keturah spread her hands, looking for all the world like she was here on a friendly visit and couldn't understand why everyone was getting so defensive. "I told you. I only want to talk."

"I'm sure you do," Matt muttered. Allura reached back to put a hand on his arm.

"All right," she said through clenched teeth. "Talk. Convince me not to kill you where you stand."

Keturah's smile slipped into something more sardonic, as though she would have called Allura's bluff except that it wasn't worth the effort. "So hasty, Allura. You always were an impetuous child."

Allura grit her teeth, and now it was Shiro who shifted closer to her--and Allura couldn't pretend he wasn't getting ready to stop her from launching a premature attack. " _Talk,_ " Allura spat. "You said that's what you wanted."

"I will, I will. I'm only waiting for the rest of the circus to arrive." She settled back against the booth, leaning on her hands and tilting her head to the side. "It's been a while, hasn't it, Princess? You haven't aged a day."

"I would say the same," Allura said, "but my father raised me not to lie."

"A pity he couldn't heed his own advice."

Allura's heart twinged, and she bit down on a hot retort. She would not allow Keturah to get a rise out of her. She refused.

Keturah's eyes remained steady on her, far sharper than her relaxed posture would suggest. "Then again, perhaps Alfor was the wise one. At least he didn't let his naiveté get him killed."

Allura had extended her staff before she could think better of it. She advanced half a step before stopping herself, Shiro's warning, " _Allura,_ " reaching her a split second after she caught her slip.

Keturah stared at her blandly, her smile widening. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," she said.

At the same moment, Allura's ears finally picked out another sound amidst the background noise of her own pounding heartbeat. It was a low, steady hum, low enough to tickle her ears, and she wasn't surprise it hadn't immediately caught her attention. It took her another fraction of a second to place the sound--the hum of a laser pistol primed and ready to fire.

She spun toward the sound, ready for an ambush, a support force, an army that had snuck in through a secondary access point to catch the paladins in a pincer while their attention was on Keturah.

Instead, she found only Matt, glassy-eyed, with his bayard leveled at Allura's head.

* * *

An alarm blared, shattering Coran's focus, and he blinked as he pried his mind out of energy usage reports and air pressure readings and a dozen other files that might give away a secondary attack Keturah had masked. His heart pounded as he lunged for the screen displaying the new alert. He might have expected a hull breach, a power failure in the engine or the teludav or the security system. He might have expected an emergency alarm triggered in one of the residential areas, or by a member of the Guard.

Instead, the alarm originated in the Red Lion's hangar, and it showed an isolated spike in Quintessence. Coran called up the visual feed in the hangar, but he saw nothing amiss. He checked the logs for recent access to the hangar, either from within the castle or without, but there was nothing since Keith and Matt had returned from their last mission.

"What is it?" Tev asked, taking a step away from his station before thinking better of it. "Another attack?"

Coran looked up, suddenly aware of the gaunt faces staring back at him. Most of these people had been here for Keturah's last attack. They knew exactly how quickly things could turn south this time.

They needed him to tell them it was all right.

He opened his mouth to do so, but all thought of comfort flew out of his head as stark horror slammed into him from four hearts at once. He staggered, head spinning, and for an instant he thought he might actually be having a heart attack.

But no... no. One look at Karen, stock still and pale as a sheet, told him it wasn't his heart that was the problem.

Something had happened. Something had happened to the paladins.

In the next heartbeat, Karen had taken off running, and it took all of Coran’s willpower not to follow after her.

* * *

This wasn't happening.

Meri stood frozen in the door to the hangar where Keturah had entered the castle-ship, only vaguely aware that her entire body was shaking. Bad enough to have Keturah's voice split what should have been a perfectly ordinary, perfectly peaceful day aboard the castle-ship. Bad enough to know they all might be in grave danger.

Now she was certain she was hallucinating. Maybe Keturah had set a trap for her mind, snaring her the moment she stepped through this door. It was the only explanation.

Shiro, Allura, Matt, and Keith had arrived at the hangar before the other paladins, the last of whom straggled in behind Meri, each exclaiming in horror and dismay as they caught sight of the scene before them: Matt and Allura, facing each other down, Matt's bayard primed to fire and pointed at Allura's face. Allura had frozen, eyes wide, hands up as though to disarm the situation. Shiro was only just turning as Meri and the others came charging in.

The scene lasted only an instant, only long enough to burn itself into Meri's memory. Then Matt drew in a sharp breath, every inch of him stiffening. He dropped his bayard like it had burned him, and it winked out of existence before it hit the floor. Matt backed away, hands up and shaking, breath rattling loud in the sudden silence.

"What...? What was...?" He grasped his hair, curling over, and suddenly Meri wasn't certain that he was breathing at all, anymore. Keith stared at him, open-mouthed, and started forward, Shiro moving at the same moment, but Matt flinched away from them both.

“Matt?” Shiro asked. “Matt, are you okay?”

Matt shook his head, stumbling as he backed further away, crumpling in on himself as he went, like he couldn’t decide whether to flee or drop to the ground and curl into a ball. His hands dropped from his hair to his mouth, and he breathed in, the sound too-loud and rasping behind his cupped hands. He staggered back another step and almost hit the ground.

Keturah's laugh, dry and rasping, drew every eye.

Shiro and Keith rounded on her more sharply than the rest, Keith’s lip pulled back to show his fangs, Shiro’s face a deathly cold mask.

Keturah raised one hand in a flippant wave. “I told you, I came here to talk. You didn’t think I’d be stupid enough to do that without a little insurance, did you?”

With a roar, Keith raised his sword and began to charge, Shiro barely half a second behind. He extended his wrist-blades, teeth bared in a promise of vengeful fury, but Keturah's lips only quirked into a smile as she raised a hand--not so much a warning as a conductor raising her baton. She paused, and then closed her fist.

Meri didn't see what happened. She was too focused on Keturah, and whatever trick she might be planning. All she saw was a blur as Keith swerved to the side, and then Shiro was crying out in pain, dropping to the ground and skidding, his hand pressed to his side, a scarlet stain growing on his armor and on the hangar floor as blood seeped between his fingers.

A horrible silence settled over the room, punctuated by the clatter of Keith's sword hitting the ground. He backpedaled, eyes wide and jaw slack, as Lance blew past him, dropping to his knees and skidding the last two feet to Shiro's side.

"Shiro! Holy shit. Holy _shit._ " Lance reached down, hands grasping at Shiro's shoulder, at his wrist. He flinched back as Shiro hissed in pain, then pressed on, coaxing Shiro's hand away from his wound. His muttered curse wasn't encouraging.

" _Takashi_."

Meri thought she couldn't feel any sicker than she already did, but Akira's broken whisper made her stomach tie itself in knots. He stumbled past her, seeming not to notice the way Keith turned toward the sound of his voice, a gutted sort of horror splashed across his face. He faded back as Akira careened toward Shiro, who was already trying to sit up, and fighting off Lance's concern to do so.

Keturah's chuckle was hardly discernible over Lance and Akira's frantic voices, and Shiro's marginally more level responses. Meri heard it, though. She heard it, and her blood boiled.

With a scream, Meri launched herself at Keturah, her staff held in both hands and Quintessence pooling just beneath her skin. She was acutely aware of the rest of the team around her, most of them frozen in shock and horror, Allura and Nyma hovering over Matt, who knelt on the floor, frozen and rigid and seemingly unaware of what was going on around him.

The distance between Meri and Keturah closed in an instant, and Meri threw her full weight into her swing.

In a flash of light, the red bayard appeared in Keturah's hand, extending into the halberd-like weapon she'd once preferred. She swung, its blade slicing Meri's staff in two, the very tip cutting a line across her cheek as Keturah bared her teeth in a manic grin.

Meri jerked back, staring at the bayard, uncomprehending. That wasn't possible. It just wasn't. The bayard was a paladin's weapon, made from the concentrated Quintessence of the Lions, tied directly to the paladin bond. Once the rightful owner summoned it, they could give it to someone else to use, but for Keturah to summon it like that, she would have had to be...

"Have you finally figured it out?" Keturah asked, driving the point of her halberd into the floor and leaning her weight on the shaft.

"Do you ever shut up?" Akira was on his feet in an instant, pistol in hand, and he planted himself squarely between Shiro and Keturah as he took aim.

Before he could pull the trigger, Keith tackled him. It was an awkward, uncertain attack--enough to throw Akira off balance, but not enough to carry him to the floor. Keith backed off almost immediately, shaking his head like he was trying to get rid of a ringing in his ears.

Akira found his balance and frowned at Keith, visibly holding himself back from crossing to Keith's side. "Keith...?"

Keith's breath hitched for an instant, and then he cursed, and the curse flowed into a rapid, faltering, trembling stream of words Meri was only half able to make out, the rest of his words obliterated by his rapid breathing.

"I didn’t mean it. I didn’t-- _vrekt_. Akira? What’s happening? Matt? I'm sorry. I’m--”

"What did you do to them?" Nyma demanded, her pistol hanging loose at her side but her glare promising a swift end if Keturah didn't answer her question.

Keturah, though, only raised her hands above her head and folded them atop her halberd. She leaned her weight on the weapon, her head tipped to the side. "Nothing the rest of you haven't done at one point or another, I'm sure."

"That's not an answer," Nyma snapped. "How are you controlling them? What did you _do?_ "

Keturah shook her head. "It's not what I've done. It's what I _am._ "

Meri's heart sank, and she reached out to stop Nyma before she launched an attack of her own. "She's a paladin."

It made an awful sort of sense. Keturah had been the red paladin. They all knew what the paladin bond was like, how it tied them together. In battle, they functioned as one unit, sharing control of separate bodies. And lately it had been happening outside the cockpit more and more. Catching glimpses of emotions, of thoughts, knowing what the other was going to do.

Keturah’s grin stretched wider. “I am. I’m one of them.” She nodded her head to Keith, huddled and half-crouched as he cowered away from Akira’s concern, Matt stunned and motionless on the floor by Allura. “Everything they’ve done this last year--every time they flew together, every mind meld exercise to lower barriers and build trust and let each other in--all the time, they were building a doorway. All I have to do now is step through.”

"No," Allura whispered, horrified. A glance showed she was still hovering over Matt, though she shifted now, like she could shield him from Keturah’s influence with her body. "No! The Red Lion rejected you. She cut you out of the bond."

Keturah huffed a laugh. "She certainly tried."

Keith made a strangled noise, staring at Keturah in abject horror. Several feet away, Matt seemed to have finally become aware of the room again, and he looked like he wanted to be sick.

Keturah snatched up her halberd, the tip breaking off a chip of the floor as it came free. Turning, she began to pace the hangar, idly swinging her halberd as she did. "You want to know why I came here?"

"Not particularly," Pidge said dryly.

Keturah ignored them. "I came here because I have a bit of a dilemma. You see, you've destroyed my red lion, and its paladin along with it."

" _We_ destroyed," Lance said with a sharp laugh. "How about _your_ lion ripped itself apart. Next time, try not making it out of a Vkullor."

"That is the plan, yes. However." Keturah turned, leaning her halberd against her shoulder. "That still leaves the issue of a pilot."

Meri's stomach churned. "Isn't that why you took Zuza?"

"The dropout? The fugitive from _Revinor_?" Keturah laughed. "She's already proven her weakness. I need someone with a stronger spirit. True, my original plan was to take Luz, raise her as my true successor." She smiled as half the team bristled in preparation for a fight. Even Meri found herself tensing, Quintessence rising to her call--and from the quick, pointed look Keturah shot her way, it hadn't gone unnoticed. With a wave of her hand, Keturah continued. "But since you all obviously don't want to give her up, I'm willing to compromise."

"Compromise?" Hunk's voice was thin with strain, but he still managed to pack that single word with derision. "Like what, you leave now and we don't kill you? Cause I could go for that sort of compromise."

"I need a pilot for the next Red Lion," Keturah said. "Fortunately, there are three people in this room right now who have already flown the old model, and a fourth who has all the necessary qualifications." Her eyes skimmed across the room, landing on Keith, Matt, Akira, and Nyma in turn. "I'll let you decide who you can get by without; it makes no difference to me."

"You expect us just to _go_ with you?" Akira asked, incredulous.

Keturah chuckled, a dry rasp that contained no trace of humor. She held her halberd out to the side, the shaft running the length of her arm. "Don't forget, I hold all the cards here."

She opened her hand and dropped the halberd, which vanished before it hit the ground, still trailing motes of light as it appeared, once more in its pistol form, in Matt's hand. He choked on his next breath, lurching backward and stumbling to his feet like it was a wild animal that was attacking him. His hand shook, his eyes staring at the weapon in horror, but he didn't let go of it--or maybe he couldn't.

Meri surged forward, every fiber of her being blazing with hatred for Keturah and what she'd become. "Stop," she growled, the snap of lightning at her fingertips hardly a flicker next to the Quintessential storm raging inside her. "You've made your point."

"Have I? I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in. I don't need to lift a finger to have him kill any one of you." Matt let out a strangled sob, and Keturah smiled as the sound tore the bottom out of Meri’s stomach. " _Any_ of you."

" _Matt!_ " Karen’s voice split the air, shrill and panicked.

Meri spun, and her heart entered free-fall as she saw Matt, swaying on his feet, his eyes screwed shut and tears running down his face, the barrel of his gun nestled underneath his chin. Pidge had started forward, only to stop short, fingers dancing on the hilt of their bayard. But what could they do? What could any of them do? One wrong move and Matt could--

"I'll go!"

Keith's broken voice rang out across the silence. It triggered another shiver that swept through Matt like a hurricane. His gun shook, then vanished, and Matt dropped to his knees.

"There, now," Keturah said as Karen sprinted to Matt’s side. "Was that so hard?"

Meri closed her fist to hold back the attack building there--Keturah's own magic, something Meri had sworn she would never use again, but by all the _ancients_ , she wanted to unleash hell on her now. Keith had already started walking toward Keturah, his face drawn and his eyes wide. Karen looked up from where she was trying to gather Matt against her, panic washing over her face as she glanced from Keith to Keturah.

“Keith,” she whispered. Then again, more firmly. “ _Keith._ What are you doing? Come here. Don’t--”

Keith closed his eyes, a tremor shaking him from head to toe, but he didn’t stop walking and gave no sign that he’d heard Karen. When he opened his eyes again, there was steel within, defiance blazing as he held Keturah’s gaze.

He jumped when Nyma's hand closed around his wrist and yanked him back.

"Let go," Keith said without turning.

"Like hell I will." Nyma's grip tightened as Keith started to move forward again. She shifted her gaze from Keith to Keturah. "You're doing this."

"Me?" Keturah splayed a hand across her chest. "I would never."

"You were ready to make Matt kill himself," Pidge said, a razor's edge cutting through their voice. If Meri were to turn, she had no doubt she would see tears gathering in their eyes. "Why not make Keith sacrifice himself, too? We already know you can control them."

Keith closed his eyes, his lips puckering like he was trying not to be sick.

Nyma gave one last tug on his arm, finally coaxing him behind her, and Akira joined her in front of him, a living wall between Keith and Keturah. "They can't volunteer," Akira said. "Neither of them."

"Does that mean you'll take his place?" Keturah asked.

Akira opened his mouth, and for an instant, Meri was sure he was going to say yes. She stepped forward, heart pounding, as Shiro--leaning heavily on Lance--called his brother's name.

“I...” Akira wavered on his feet, suddenly pale, his wide eyes staring at something Meri couldn't see. "I’ll..." He swallowed, shook his head, lifted his foot--

“ _Akira_.”

Akira fell back a step, his breath catching in his throat. He stared at Nyma, at Keith behind her, started to say something else, turned to search Shiro out in the crowed arrayed around the room, each of them ready for a fight but too afraid to start it.

Something beyond Shiro caught his eye, and he stilled, his mouth closing, his spine straightening as he breathed in and blew it out slowly.

Before Meri could say anything else, Akira spun on his heel and took off for the door at a sprint.

Silence descended in the wake of his departure. Keith stared after Akira, heartbreak and resignation on his face, and as he turned again to walk toward Keturah, Nyma grabbed him by the arm, her fingers digging so deep into his flesh Meri was sure it would leave bruises. Shiro seemed stunned, the furrow of his brow testifying to confusion as Lance adjusted his hold on him. Matt only bowed over, dragging his mother down with him.

Keturah, for her part, seemed to find the whole thing highly amusing.

"Is this the measure of an adjunct?" she asked. "It would seem my generation wasn't missing out on much."

"Would you shut up, for once in your life?" Val spat.

Keturah's expression soured. "Fine. You." She looked at Nyma. "The adjunct has fled. Let Keith volunteer like he wanted to or take his place yourself. It makes no difference to me, but my patience has its limits."

"Nyma," Keith breathed--short, hiccuping breaths that made his voice waver. "Don't. Let her have me. It's okay. I don't want to hurt anyone else."

"Shut up, Keith," she hissed, blinking furiously. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Nyma.” Val’s voice was more breath than sound, but Meri heard the fear in it, and a muscle tensed in Nyma’s jaw as though to testify that she’d heard it too, and refused to acknowledge it.

Keturah cocked her head to the side. “We have Rolo.”

Nyma stopped breathing--more from rage than anything, Meri was sure, but to Keturah it must have looked like shock. All the better.

“You were close, weren’t you?” Keturah went on, oozing satisfaction. “I know he misses you. _Desperately._ Come with me, and you’ll see him again.”

Meri’s heart twinged in sympathy as a storm brewed behind Nyma’s eyes. It might have been easier to refuse if she didn’t already know that Keturah was telling the truth. Cynical as she was, Nyma probably would have assumed Keturah was lying.

But she wasn’t, and everyone in the room knew it. If Nyma went, she _would_ find her way to Rolo. Whether or not she retained herself long enough to know it, Meri couldn’t say.

“Nyma,” Val whispered, closing the distance to Nyma and grabbing at her arm.

Nyma shook her off. “Don’t.” She raised her chin, staring Keturah down. “This is the only choice that makes sense.”

She stepped forward, slipping out of Val's grip, and then out of Keith's as he, too, tried to claw her back. Straightening her spine, she met Keturah’s smug gaze with a glare of her own and set a pace too brisk for second thoughts or interruptions.

She made it half a dozen steps before a roar filled the air.

It rang in the rafters and thundered in Meri's chest, a sound too loud to bear. She gasped, trying to cover her ears, but even if her helmet weren't in the way, she had a feeling it wouldn't have helped. This wasn't a sound so much as a feeling.

A feeling that made Matt let out a strangled scream, dropped Keith like a sentry with its power cut, rocked Keturah so she fell back against the customs booth, her form rippling. For just an instant, she looked almost as she had before the war--pale skin, honeyed eyes, but still the lank, colorless hair.

Another heartbeat, and her shift reasserted itself, but she was still shaken, clutching at her chest as she stared at the floor. Matt’s breath echoed loud in the silence that followed, choked with dry sobs of pain.

Keith's head snapped up, his lip pulling back in a snarl. The same pain that twisted Matt’s voice, dominated Keturah’s focus, hung in the air like an oncoming storm--it burned deep in Keith’s eyes and pulled at his face, but he seized it like a weapon. Sharpened it, and directed it at Keturah. He roared as he charged her, the red bayard falling into his hands. Keturah startled and looked up, and she raised a hand as though to ward him off, but he kept coming, and shock burst across her face in the instant before he reached her.

She vanished as Keith's sword struck for her heart, and she reappeared at the base of her shuttle's ramp, stumbling and catching herself on the support. She shouted at her druids, her voice raw and ragged, and nothing at all like her usual poise. If Meri didn’t know better, she would have thought Keturah was afraid.

“Coran!”

Allura’s voice was sharp and hard, and it snapped Meri out of her daze. Allura was racing for the ship as it lifted off, her staff clutched in one hand as she pressed the other to the side of her helmet. “She’s running! Shoot her down. Now!”

A commotion followed--shouting on the comms, flashes of light through the open hangar door. Pidge and Hunk both chased after Allura--trying to stop Keturah’s ship or just trying to stop Allura flinging herself into space in pursuit, Meri wasn’t sure. She was having a hard time focusing on any of it.

All too soon, it was over, Allura returning to the group with a string of curses she could only have picked up from Lealle, and Coran reporting that Keutrah had escaped.

No one seemed to know what to do in the silence that followed. Matt's shallow, shaky breaths left a pit in Meri's stomach. She should go to him--but Karen was already there, talking to him in a low tone, and Pidge joined them in moments, and Meri didn't want to intrude. She should go to Nyma, who looked rattled by her own close call. Too rattled to defend herself against Val, who was berating her between hiccuping sobs, alternately hitting Nyma and kissing her. She should go to Keith, except that Shiro was already headed for him, leaning on Lance, both of them more concerned for Keith than for the blood leaving a trail between them.

Keith saw it, though, and stepped back, hugging himself. He made a sound Meri had heard only a few times before, and usually when a Galra was mourning the death of a loved one, or was mortally wounded. It was a thin keening sound, and Keith bit down on it at once, but it still cut Meri to the core.

Matt heard it, too, and looked up, his eyes clearing for a moment, his breath slowing. He twisted away from Pidge's clinging hands, ducked around the other paladins, giving them a wide berth, like he was afraid to touch them. When he made it past Shay, though, he broke into a listing run, tripping over his own feet in his haste to reach Keith.

They said nothing as they collided, just clung to each other, Keith folding in on himself, Matt wrapping him up, a teary-eyed glare peeking over Keith's head like Matt was waiting for someone else to come and hurt them. They were shaking, both of them, shivering with whole-body tremors they couldn't seem to stop. Keith made that noise again, helpless and pained, and Matt's protective expression wavered, his face crumpling, blinking rapidly as his tears spilled over. He squeezed Keith tighter, and he closed his eyes, and Meri kept thinking that she should be there, helping to comfort them.

She couldn't help but think that her comfort wouldn't have been welcome.

* * *

"What... What happened?"

Keith tensed at the sound of Hunk's voice--at his question, yes, but also at the simple sound of it. At the way it burst against his eardrums, too loud and too close and throbbing in time with the headache steadily building behind his eyes. Matt's arms around him tightened, and Keith tried to relax into his hold, to remember how to breathe, but it hurt too much. _Everything_  hurt.

There was more silence following Hunk's question, but it wasn't the silence of before, the shock that had dragged on for seconds or minutes while Keith struggled to grab hold of himself. His mind felt like a sieve, thoughts flying in and out without any semblance of order, emotions swelling to the cusp of an explosion only to vanish entirely in the next instant, vertigo that had nothing to do with his physical state catching him by surprise every few seconds until he was leaning his full weight against Matt just to keep from dropping.

 _Now_ , the silence was expectant, and no one seemed to want to fill it. Were they expecting _Keith_ to answer? He didn't know what had happened any better than the rest of them. Haggar came, and she was inside his head, and Shiro was bleeding, and Keith felt like a stranger in his own body, and then came a pain so blinding he hardly remembered it as _pain_  at all. Just an instant of nothing, and then agony lancing through his body with every breath, every heartbeat.

He just wanted it to stop.

"That's not important now." Shiro's voice, tight with pain and closer than Keith expected. "Are you two okay?"

Keith felt the ghost of a hand hovering over his shoulder, and he flinched away, ducking out of Matt's hold. He hurried to put distance between himself and Shiro, his heart fluttering in his chest. He wrapped his arms around his waist to disguise their shaking, but he couldn't stop himself from staring at the wound in Shiro's side. He didn't know how bad it was, but it was bloody, slicking the hand Shiro had pressed to his side, smearing crimson streaks across Lance's armor.

Keith gagged, the pain-guilt-shame-terror rising in a chaotic swirl until all he wanted to do was find somewhere to sit down and curl into a ball until the nausea passed.

"Keith," Shiro said, staggering toward him, his voice impossibly soft, far softer than Keith deserved after what he'd done. "Keith's, it's okay. I'm _okay_. An hour in a pod and it'll be like nothing ever happened."

Keith shook his head, taking another step back. He swayed as he did so, his feet finding an imaginary precipice, like Shiro was backing him toward a cliff's edge. He opened his mouth to say something, but his tongue didn't want to cooperate, and his vision was narrowing to the red on Shiro and Lance's armor, the red of his _own_ armor haunting the fringes of his vision.

Shiro ducked his head, trying to catch Keith's eye. "It's not your fault, Keith. She took control of me, too, remember?"

It wasn't the same. Keith _knew_  it wasn't the same, but he couldn't make himself say it. This hadn't been Keturah taking control of him, forcing him out, stealing his body to use as her puppet. It didn't feel like Keith had ever lost control at all. It felt like _him_. It felt like _Matt_. It felt so natural there was no chance to fight it, no sensation of being pushed out. Just him and his instincts and the tide of guilt and horror when those instincts made him attack one of his best friends.

Shiro finally stopped trying to get close to Keith. Maybe he realized that Keith didn't want him close. Didn't want to accidentally hurt him again. Keturah was gone ( _why?_ he wondered), but did that mean she couldn't get to him anymore? Or was she always inside his head? Would he always have to be on his guard from now on, just in case she made him attack someone else?

Allura came up behind Lance, touching his shoulder and then taking his place on Shiro's right side while Lance moved to support him from the left. Allura's face remained neutral as she coaxed Shiro's hand away from his wound, giving nothing away despite how intently Keith watched for signs that it was, in fact, as bad as it looked. All she did, though, was press her own hand to Shiro's side, heedless of the blood. The soft blue glow of Quintessence filled her veins, spread across her skin, sank into Shiro's side. She whispered something to him, and he nodded, and bile rose again in the back of Keith's throat. He backed up another step, and the vertigo hit him again, like he was searching for a wall, or a body to lean against, only to find emptiness where there should have been warmth.

The mewling, desperate sound rose up in his throat again--a child's cry, a show of weakness he'd outgrown long ago--and he sank his teeth into his lip to keep the sound from escaping. The way Matt turned toward him at once, hollow eyes suddenly focusing on Keith, his efforts weren't entirely successful.

A _pop_ in his ear--too close, _too loud_ \--made Keith jump, and he fumbled with his helmet's catch as Coran's frantic voice came on the comms. Keith only half-heard what he was saying--calling for Allura, asking what had happened, was everything okay. The catch finally gave, and Keith ripped his helmet off--but not fast enough to avoid the last of what Coran said.

"--disturbance in the Red Lion's hangar--"

Keith dropped his helmet. The chasm in his mind yawned wider, the emptiness reverberating on every side. He reached, and reached, and Matt caught his eye, and he knew.

The silence.

The emptiness that opened like a chasm behind every step.

The coldness so deep it went beyond shivering into a tremor that chased every beat of his heart.

He couldn't sense Red.

They turned as one and ran for the door, the pounding of Keith's feet rattling in his teeth. His ears were pressed flat against his skull; he was hyper-aware of them, and of his breathing (too loud, too quick, too shallow to do him any good.) It didn't matter, though. The pain, the hollowness--it was all in the bond, like Keturah's invasion had twisted it somehow. Made it shrivel up. Severed it, maybe, except he could still sense Matt as a shadow dogging his every step.

The others chased after them, calling out in a panic, but Keith didn't slow to let them catch up. Everything was wrong, and Red wasn't answering, and all he could think was that she didn't deserve this, not on top of everything else.

The door to Red's hangar didn't open fast enough, and Keith slammed his shoulder into it as he careened through. He hissed in pain, but didn't slow. There was Red, just ahead of him, lying peacefully in the center of the space, her eyes dark, her mind quiet, her ramp already extended. She stirred as they approached--only a little, only enough for Keith to sense from her sorrow, and guilt, and pain. So much pain.

He tripped up the ramp, and Matt surged past him, up into an empty cockpit. A hatch at the back was open into the maintenance space, ghostly blue light tracing the edges of the opening. It was the only light in the cockpit, and it felt like a bucket of ice water dumped over Keith's head.

They hesitated there only a moment, Matt evidently no more eager to move on than Keith, but what choice did they have? The pain was building, a steady throb inside his head, inside his chest. His lungs grew tight, his vision sparked with little bursts of white, and the yawning emptiness drew him deeper into Red like gravity.

Matt gathered his courage first and ducked through the maintenance hatch, descending a ladder into Red's inner workings. Keith followed, clutching the ladder in a steely grip, afraid that his shaking hands and weak knees might betray him at any moment. It was a blessing to reach the catwalk below, and he attempted a smile for Matt when he reached out to steady him.

They forged ahead in silence, Keith's fur standing on end as they followed the weak glow deeper and deeper. Something didn't feel right, and he didn't think it was the pain, or the guilt that was still making him queasy. It was only when Matt tripped and caught himself on the railing, the crash of his boot against the catwalk filling the space and clawing against Keith's ears, that he realized what it was that had him so on edge.

Silence.

Keith had been inside Red's maintenance spaces only infrequently. Matt was better than him at maintenance, and if he needed help he asked Pidge or Hunk or Coran before he asked Keith. He remembered it being pleasantly quiet in here, tucked away from the bustle of the castle and sheltered from the chaos of war. It was like curling up beside a fireplace, shrouded in warmth and peace.

But Red was a living machine, and she was never totally silent. The rumble of her engines, the whir of more delicate machinery, the hum of Quintessence in her conduits--there was always some amount of white noise when Keith was inside her.

There was nothing now. Just their footsteps, their breathing, and now the thud of feet and rumble of voices above and behind as the others reached the cockpit.

Red stirred again, hardly a breath in the silence, but enough to draw them onward. Matt rounded the last corner before Keith and froze, and Keith tensed in sympathy before surging forward to see for himself what had caught Matt by surprise.

Akira knelt on the catwalk ten feet away, his hands resting lightly on his knees, his head tipped back and turned slightly toward Keith and Matt. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed. On the catwalk all around him, dusting the nearby machinery and cascading down into the darkness below, were bits of glittering crystal, still glowing faintly blue. The remnants of Red's core crystal still hovered in the containment field at the center of the catwalk ring here, light flickering, darting along the jagged, broken edges like lightning. A length of metal lay discarded beside Akira, glowing blue with crystal dust; it looked like Akira had ripped it off the catwalk's railing before attacking the crystal.

The crystal flickered again, and Keith's heart faltered with it.

"Akira?" Matt's voice was small and fragile, and he took a single step forward before halting again, his hands curled against his chest. "What did you do?"

As though it weren't obvious. The shattered crystal, the dust on Akira's hands, on his armor, the conspicuous silence in the bond and in the air around them.

Akira sighed, his whole body swelling and deflating in time with the breath. He stood slowly, turned fully toward them, and opened his eyes. The irises had turned to gold, startlingly clear and shining in the darkness, and suddenly Keith noticed more lights, little spots of red across his face like broken capillaries. Tiny crimson patterns like cracked glass, like starbursts burned into his skin, each of them glowing so faintly Keith wouldn't have noticed their light except that it was otherwise so dark in this space. Only the dying crystal, Akira's eyes, and those marks.

"Don't blame Akira," Akira said, his voice slower and smoother than normal. "Please. And don't let him blame himself. I'm the one who did this. It was _my_  choice." A pause, the slope of his brows softening. "Make sure he understands that?"

Keith stared at Akira--at the shattered crystal behind him, at the gold in his eyes, the crimson beneath his skin. Keith felt like he wasn't breathing right, but he couldn't make his lungs work. "Red?"

Akira smiled. "My paladins."

"I don't understand." Matt shook his head, blinking as though to clear his vision. "I thought you said this was dangerous--possessing Akira like this."

"I did, and it is. But he'll be all right. I'm too weak now to do any damage. Besides, after this he doesn't have to worry about me anymore."

Keith's mouth ran dry. "What do you mean?"

Akira closed his eyes, his brow furrowing, his smile faltering. "I'm dying, Keith."

" _No._  We can save you. We can--"

"This is my choice. No one else should have to pay the price for my mistakes. _I_ chose Keturah. _I_ failed to stop her when she turned her back on her team."

A thunder of footsteps filled the air, and Keith wheeled around as the others appeared, charging around the corner and stopping short. Hunk saw the shattered crystal and cried out in dismay; Meri fell back a step, looking suddenly ill. Shiro pressed his way through the crowd from the back of the group, Allura at his side, her hand still pressed to his wound. He wasn't as pale as he'd been before, but he still looked shaky, and Keith turned away before he made himself sick again.

"Akira?" Shiro asked. "What happened?"

Matt moved toward Shiro, out of Keith's line of sight. "That's not Akira," he said. "Not right now. Red... took over."

It turned Keith's stomach, hearing it put like that. Like Red was doing what Haggar had done earlier--mind control. Possession. Using people as her puppets.

Akira's gaze turned to Keith, and he had the unnerving impression that Red had heard his thoughts.

"I was the one who first thought to choose two paladins," Akira said. His voice wavered, like he was on the edge of tears. "I was the one who first chose an adjunct. But it was my sisters who made something beautiful of it. Everything I did, I did out of fear, and out of shame. I knew Keturah refused to relinquish our bond, and I feared she would be able to use it against me. So I chose two paladins, hoping they would be able to fend her off. I knew there was a chance it wouldn’t be enough, not with all Keturah’s experience, so I chose an adjunct. An extension of myself. A last resort, in case I ever became a bigger liability than asset.

"Black and I... We were used against our sisters, forced to fight our own family--and then Keturah took you." Akira tore his eyes away from Keith and looked instead at Shiro and Allura. "We agreed, then, that we would never let her take us or our paladins again. We would do whatever it took." Akira closed his eyes and nodded. "Once I'm dead, there will be no bond for her to manipulate. Keith. Matt. She won't be able to reach you. _Never_  again."

"And what are we supposed to to?" Keith demanded. "Without you, there _is_  no Voltron!"

Akira breathed in and released it slowly. "I know. And I know you will hate me for it. Akira, too. I always knew he would come to hate me one day. Better for this than for the alternative."

Keith's breath was coming short again, the mewling sound trying to start up once more in his throat. He growled instead, storming toward Akira. "You can't just--You don't get to-- _Vrekt._ "

Akira smiled, raising one hand to cup Keith's cheek. "I know," he said, and kissed Keith's forehead. "And I know you'll get through this. Tell Akira I'm sorry."

Before Keith could think of anything else to say, the light faded from Akira's eyes, from the spots on his face. His hand dropped from Keith's face, and he staggered back, his legs giving out. Keith caught him as he fell, easing him to the ground and hovering close as he groaned and cradled his head in his hands.

"What happened? Keith?" Akira sat up straight, then hissed in pain, and Keith pursed his lips.

"We’re fine," he said. "Haggar left." He hesitated, trying to find some way to tell Akira what had happened. What Red had done. He glanced up at the shattered crystal--still glowing faintly, but he had to wonder how long that would last.

Beside him, Akira stiffened, and Keith turned to find him staring at his hands and the luminous crystal dust coating them. He scrambled to his feet and turned, horrified at the sight of the crystal. "What--What did I--?"

"It was Red," Matt said, his voice shaking. "She took control of you. She said-- She said she didn't want Keturah to be able to get to us through her, so she..."

He didn't seem to know how to finish the sentence, but Akira clearly understood what he wasn't saying. He doubled over, hands clutching at his hair. Keith wondered if he felt it too--that emptiness. The vertigo of reaching for a bond only to find it absent.

"So... what now?" Lance asked, turning to Hunk. "Her crystal's broken... Can we get a new one? Shay?"

"It's not that simple, Lance," Meri said. She sounded tired, and the look she gave Keith, when he looked her way, made him tear up for reasons he couldn't fully express. "It's not just any Quintessence that powers the lions. Red is only Red because it's _her_ Quintessence running through her conduits. Maybe we can find a Balmera crystal to replace this one, and maybe that will be enough to power the Lion, but I don't even know how to begin to transfer Red's Quintessence to the new crystal-- _if_ it's possible at all."

Silence followed this declaration, and Akira sat down heavily against the catwalk railing, dropping his head onto his knees. Keith hesitated, then slowly repositioned himself so he was sitting next to Akira, not quite close enough to touch.

Allura glanced to Meri, then Shiro, talking to him in a low tone.

"I’m fine," he said, drawing himself up straighter and trying to hide his wince as the motion pulled at his half-healed wound.

Allura frowned, but pulled away from him, and Matt shifted closer in her stead. "Right," she said. "I'll get Coran down here, see if he has any ideas."

He wouldn't. Keith didn't need to wait to know that. The lions were ancient machines, their creators already long dead by the time Altea fell. Coran might know how to repair the physical machine, but no one still living knew how to make it _live_.

"Well, _fuck,_ " Nyma said, so sharply even Akira lifted his head to stare at her. She crossed her arms, glowering at the wall instead of meeting anyone else's eyes. "Come on. Don't tell me none of you have realized it yet."

"Realized what?" Pidge asked.

Nyma huffed. "Seriously? Who are the four people in this room with connections to the dying lion?" She flung an arm out as the others all stared at her. "Where in the whole _vrekking_  universe can we possibly go to find someone who knows more about the lions than us?"

Matt's breath left him in a rush, and Nyma rounded on him, her prickly facade faltering as Matt's expression crumbled.

“We’ve been wondering all this time what could possibly happen to make you agree to go back to Oriande,” she said, a little more gently than before. “Looks like we found our answer.”


	14. A Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Keturah broke into the Castle of Lions, where she confronted the paladins--and revealed that she's able to partially control Keith and Matt through the paladin bond. She used them to attack the other paladins and leveraged them as ransom to convince one of the four people bonded to the Red Lion to surrender themself to Keturah and become her new red paladin. To stop her, Red took control of Akira and used him to shatter her own crystal--a mortal blow, unless the paladins find something in Oriande that can save her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Brief reference to intrusive thoughts and suicidal imagery re: Haggar threatening to make Matt kill himself last chapter. To avoid it, skip the short paragraph that follows, "Fair enough. Matt was still thinking about it, too." in the first scene.

Matt should have been doing something.

The thought repeated on endless loop in his head as he sat in the rec room at fought not to be sick. He had his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed over his eyes. Even half an hour after leaving Red's hangar (leaving her _corpse_ , it felt, though everyone assured him she wasn't dead yet), Matt hadn't stopped shaking. His chest quivered with each breath, and he could never be sure that the next heartbeat was coming.

The absence on the other end of the bond resonated, a pit that grew wider with every passing second. All he could think about was how wrong it was, how Red should have been there. It wasn't right without her steady flame in the back of his mind.

Keith had backed himself against one arm of the couch, his feet pulled up on the cushion, his head buried in his arms atop his knees. He hadn't moved since they'd all relocated here, and hadn't acknowledged anyone else in the room. Not that Matt could blame him; he was only barely tolerating his mother's proximity, and unlike Keith, he had always thrived on displays of affection.

Akira was almost as withdrawn as Keith. More distant, certainly. He'd avoided the couch entirely and stood instead in the back corner of the room, watching them all, though Matt wasn't sure how much he was paying attention to anything around him. Matt could just see him out of the corner of his eye, his arms folded over his chest, glaring at the door. The golden light was gone from his eyes and hadn't made a reappearance since Red had left him, but Matt couldn't stop looking for it.

Shiro had tried talking to him when they first got here, but Akira only shrugged him off, and eventually Shiro had retreated to the couch. He hid it well, but his wound was obviously still bothering him. Allura had healed him as much as she could, but he still needed a stay in the pods.

Shiro being Shiro, he'd quietly declined Allura's suggestion he take care of that now, and had instead dug in here, rubbing Pidge's back distractedly as he stared at the floor. Keith had tensed only a little when Shiro sat down five feet away, not even once lifting his head, but Matt knew Keith was still thinking about the fight against Keturah. About attacking Shiro.

Fair enough. Matt was still thinking about it, too.

He doubted he'd ever forget the feeling of his pistol pressing against his chin. It hadn't felt real, and even now he wasn't sure if the idle, dispassionate thought that it would only take a twitch of his finger to end it all had come from him or from Keturah.

No one had said a word for the last ten minutes, and the silence was starting to get to Matt. He wanted to ask if there was something he could do--he knew Val and Nyma were getting a shuttle ready to take them to Roya Vosar and the tower there that would take them to Oriande.

Matt closed his eyes, a fresh wave of nausea sweeping through him. _Oriande._  He never wanted to go back there. He'd _sworn_  not to go back there after last time, but now...

It might be the only way to save Red, and there was nothing Matt wouldn't do for her. If it meant going back to that fucking awful place with all the secrets, all the lies, all the cheerful smiles and the utter unhelpfulness--

They weren't going to help this time, either, were they? Fine. Matt would tear the whole place apart if that was what it took. There had to be a way to help Red somewhere in Oriande. Matt couldn't let himself think otherwise.

Still, he should have been doing something, not just sitting here wallowing. Coran and Hunk were down with Red, working frantically to patch her up, hoping to sustain her long enough for Matt, Keith, Akira, and Nyma to make it to Oriande and back. Shay had gone to get in touch with the free Balmerans, hoping to get a new crystal for Red. It was a temporary fix at best, just a way to buy themselves a little more time--assuming the free Balmerans agreed to give it. Matt was sure Theros or Atsiphos or Metos would agree gladly, but all of them were still suffering from the damage the Empire had dealt them. Only Theros might be able to weather the sacrifice, and no one wanted to ask it of her.

Thus the diplomacy. Allura and Meri would travel with Shay to the free Balmera to make the formal request once Allura opened a wormhole for Matt and the others.

Matt glanced at the time, embossed in soft contrast over the door in a display Matt still hadn’t totally figured out, and wondered how much longer it would be until they were ready for departure.

He should be out here. Helping.

He couldn’t find it in him to uncurl, to open himself up when the sickening sense of violation, of Haggar reaching inside him and pulling his strings, was so fresh on his mind.

So he sat, and he hugged a pillow to his chest like a shield, and he watched the minutes tick away.

* * *

It was Pidge who broke the silence hanging over the rec room.

"It's hard, isn't it?" they asked, out of the blue. Shiro jumped and turned toward them, as did Matt, while Keith and Akira hardly seemed to have heard. Pidge leaned their hands on the edge of the couch cushion and sat forward, kicking one heel against the couch. "There's this..." They lifted one hand, grasping at the air as they searched for the right word. "This emptiness, and it's everywhere, and you can't just _ignore_ it..."

They trailed off, and Keith shifted, wrapping his arms more tightly around his head, and Karen's heart gave a twinge. She existed on the edge of the paladin bond--part of it, but not in the same way her children were. She knew that they put a lot of themselves into the bond, but even now, she wasn't sure what that meant.

Pidge sighed, then lifted their head and looked at Matt. "Do yourself a favor, and don't get stuck inside your own head. It just makes it harder not to get sucked into those holes. Trust me." One side of their mouth quirked upward in a feeble smile, but it soon faltered, and they dropped their gaze. "It's too easy to get lost inside your own head when the bond gets all fucked up like that."

Matt stared at them, a lost look on his face, and he slowly extended a hand. Pidge scrunched up their face, then stood and crossed to him, dropping down beside him and wrapping their arms around him. "It's gonna be okay," they muttered. "You're gonna go to Oriande, and you're gonna figure out a way to help her."

There was a waver in their voice that belied their confidence, but Matt only clung to them, ducking his head to avoid Shiro's gaze. Shiro's brow furrowed, and he glanced toward Keith, who still hadn't moved. Akira stood behind him, but Karen could see the way his glare had turned strained, his eyes squinting against his tears.

The door hissed opened, and Karen turned, expecting to see Val or Nyma, come to tell them they were ready to go.

Instead, it was Keena, and Karen was halfway across the room before Keena had taken a single step. Keena opened her mouth, fake sympathy plastered all across her face, but Karen didn't give her a chance to talk. She shoved her back, out into the hall, and let the door shut behind her.

"Karen," Keena said.

Karen held up a hand to silence her. "I don't want to hear it."

"I only want to--"

"I don't care. You need to leave."

Keena's eye twitched. "Since when is that _your_ call to make?"

An unnatural calmness had settled over Karen, slowing her breathing, calming her pulse. Her voice remained low and steady as she stepped forward, forcing Keena away from the door. "Fight me, Keena" she said. "I'm not letting you go in there and upset him more just because you feel entitled to trample all over him as part of your latest plot."

Keena didn't rise to the bait. Disappointing. Karen could have really gone for a fist fight right now, even if she would end up getting her ass handed to her. "How is he?" Keena asked instead, still trying to look concerned. "I heard what happened."

"Of course you did. And he's hurting--not that that's what you meant, I'm sure. Whatever it is you want from him, it's going to have to wait."

"Do you always have to vilify me, Karen? We're on the same side."

Karen bit her lip against her first response, which would have certainly given her that fist fight. Instead, she released a breath and shook her head. "No, Keena. We're not on the same side anymore, if we ever were. You want to win the war, no matter the cost. I just want to keep my family safe long enough to see the other side."

Keena's syrupy smile dropped at last. "So, what? You would sabotage the war effort to save your son's life?"

"If it's your idea of a 'war effort?' I would sabotage it for much less than Keith's _life._ "

Keena went deathly silent, her ears cocking back, her eyes narrowing. The faintest hint of a growl started up in the back of her throat. Another instant, and Keena was the one stepping forward, leveraging her height to force Karen back. Keena was short for a Galra, but she still had several inches on Karen, who yielded a single step, then stood fast, meeting Keena glare for glare.

"Let me tell you something about Galra, Karen," Keena said, still with that rumbling growl underscoring her words. "We call it _akem vetok,_  a maternal instinct of sorts." She stepped forward, and before Karen could process what was happening, Keena had her hand around Karen's throat. Her claws pricked, and she squeezed--not tight enough to constrict airflow, but a promise that she could snap Karen's neck in an instant if she chose. She took another step forward, forcing Karen back two to compensate for the length of her stride. "Galra mothers will kill for their young. That instinct is well-documented--and well respected. You provoke a mother and she kills you, and most of the time no one will even bother pressing charges." Karen's back hit a wall, and Keena leaned over to place her mouth next to Karen's ear. "Only a fool comes between a mother and her kit."

Karen swallowed, the motion of her throat reminding her sharply of Keena's claws. One squeeze, and Karen was dead, but she couldn't find it in her to fear. "Kill me or don't, Keena," she said, her voice cool. "But know that if you do, you will _never_  see Keith again."

The growl started in Keena's throat, but it quickly spread through her whole body, even shivering in the claws pressed to Karen's throat.

The claws disappeared, the growl cut off, and Keena retreated, plastering another pleasant mask on, as though she could sweep this entire conversation under the rug. "Just as long as you understand where I'm coming from," Keena said. "I don't mean to be so... _aggressive._  I'm only worried about my son." She stepped back again before Karen could respond, tipping her hand in a wave and turning to go. "Wish him luck for me?"

Karen smiled--grimaced--at Keena's retreating back, but stayed where she was until Keena had disappeared from view. Karen counted to twenty to be safe, then turned to search for a shiny enough panel to check her reflection. She couldn't feel any scratches on her neck, but it was sore, and she didn't want to go back in there with a telltale bruise on her throat.

She might have taken it to Coran--in fact, part of her hoped the bruise would show up later in the day. She wasn't above using this to litigate Keena off the castle-ship, if that was what it took to keep her away from Keith. But she didn't want him to see it when he was in this state. He'd only find some way to blame himself, and there had already been far too much self-flagellation for one day.

Once she was reasonably certain no signs of the scuffle showed on her skin, Karen reentered the rec room, pointedly ignoring the way Shiro and Pidge were both openly staring at her. She had eyes only for Keith, who still hadn't moved. He seemed not to have realized Keena had been here at all, and for that, Karen was grateful.

She sat beside him, careful to leave a bit of space between them, heart aching when he flinched anyway.

"Keith?" she asked softly, ducking her head. His ear twitched, but he gave no other sign that he'd heard her. She clasped her hands in her lap, resisting the urge to reach out and run her fingers through his hair. "I know it hurts, baby. I'm so sorry."

His hands curled tighter around his knees at that, but he said nothing.

"You'll find something in Oriande," she said. "I'm certain of it, and so is Green."

Keith stiffened and finally lifted his head, and Karen didn't allow for a flicker of doubt to show on her face. She _was_ certain, the same way she was certain that Val had finished preparations and was on her way here now with Nyma. Someone or something in Oriande would be able to save Red, and the other lions knew about it.

So why, then, was there a vein of hesitation running through that knowledge? Even if it was difficult, even if the Sages were reluctant, Red had chosen some of the most stubborn people on the entire team. They would find a way.

Keith looked so lost now, though, tears darkening the fur around his eyes and more tears fighting their way out, that Karen found it hard to care about the things the adjunct bond didn't tell her. "It's going to be okay, Keith," she murmured. She hesitated, part of her afraid to push too far, part of her tired of always holding back. "You look like you could use a hug." She spread her arms, but let Keith decide whether or not to close the distance between them.

And he did, after only a moment's deliberation. His face scrunched up, and he pitched forward, falling against her rather awkwardly, his legs still folded between them, his arms wrapped around himself. Karen didn't mind. Pidge had been a prickly hugger for most of their childhood, alternately chasing cuddles and resenting them--or more often only pretending to--and Karen had learned the difference between the posturing and those times when touch actually was too much.

She held Keith now as he shook, shivering like he was cold, his face turned into Karen's shoulder. She kissed his head, and he shuddered again. Tears soaked her shirt, but she made no comment on them. She'd known Keith long enough to know he still struggled to show vulnerability and to accept comfort when it was offered. It was a mark of trust--or of utter exhaustion--that he let her see him like this, and she refused to betray that trust.

He'd quieted somewhat but was still leaning against her when the door opened again and Nyma and Val stepped in.

"We're ready whenever you are," Nyma said.

Keith tensed in Karen's arms, but after only a moment he pulled away, his damp fur the only sign that he'd been crying. He stood, and Matt stood with him. Akira joined them silently, startling Karen, who hadn't even realized he'd left his post at the back of the room.

Matt offered him a weak smile, squeezed Keith's hand, and nodded to Nyma. "Let's go."

* * *

Roya Vosar wasn't much to look at from the sky. A sprawling forest dominated the landscape, ruins poking up through the canopy like bits of broken bone. Not knowing what this place had looked like in its heyday, and having seen far grander and more exotic sights in his travels, Akira was frankly underwhelmed.

From the ground, admittedly, it was a little more impressive--the forest, if not the ruins. The foliage was thick and stubborn, and it took them nearly an hour to hack their way through the quarter mile between their landing site and the tower that was their target.

The tower itself was both more and less than Akira expected. Taller, in part because the trees here dwarfed the ruins from the sky. But Akira had also expected the tower to be... _more._ It was too narrow to look natural, more of a spire than a tower. There probably wasn't any actual open space inside; if there was, it would hardly be enough for a tight spiral stair.

Vines and weeds grew up against the walls of the tower, but they'd mostly been cleared away in a narrow section near the ground--an eerie coincidence or else the mark of the team's last visit to this place. Matt headed for this clear space at once, brushing off the pristine white walls and then pressing his palm to the stone. He closed his eyes, and for a long moment it was quiet. Akira hung back with Keith and Nyma, the chatter of alien birds filling the air around them. He assumed they were birds, anyway, though they sounded almost like cicadas.

Matt breathed out, and the entire jungle seemed to fall silent as though waiting to see what he would do. The blue glow of Quintessence diffused beneath his skin, sank into the tower, and spread outward along intricately patterned lines etched into the stone. It was a slow spread at first, but it gained momentum as it went, the lines branching and multiplying and spiraling up the tower until it was difficult to distinguish the light because of the distance.

A moment later, the light expanded, consuming the tower and turning it into a beacon.

Matt opened his eyes, pulled his hand back, and glanced over his shoulder. "Well... there we go. You guys ready?"

Nyma squared her shoulders and stepped up to the glowing tower. "Nothing's gonna get done by standing around," she said.

She waited just a moment, just long enough for the others to nod, and then she stepped forward, disappearing into the light. Matt followed, and Keith moved to do the same. He hesitated just before stepping through, and Akira laid a hand on his shoulder.

"You okay?"

Keith shook himself. "Fine," he said, and stepped forward into the light.

He obviously wasn't fine--at all--and Akira felt stupid for asking. Were _any_  of them okay? Red was dying; Akira could feel it from all the way across the universe. It was a shiver that had taken root inside his ribs, always there, making him feel short of breath no matter what he did. He just felt... shaky. Almost blind. Red's instincts weren't something that was easily defined, or easily recognizable even for Akira--but now that that instinct was faltering, he could tell. It was like stepping out onto a snowy sidewalk, unsure whether ice lurked underneath just waiting to bring you down.

But it was more than that. This gateway should have been innocuous. It was exactly what they'd expected to find here, and Matt had passed through it once before to reach Oriande. So why, then, was Akira so reluctant to enter?

The light began to burn off at the edges, wisps of steam rising from the stone as the light faded from the engraved pattern and the beacon began to shrink. Akira cursed and darted forward, turning his shoulders sideways to pass through without clipping the edges.

There was no ground on the other side.

He stepped, and both ground and foot vanished. For hardly a second, he fell, but before the panic had a chance to swell, he was standing again. There was no landing, no impact to say he'd actually fallen. His stomach leaped into his throat, and then he stood on solid ground, a low red glow all around.

...Mostly solid ground.

And the glow? Was lava.

Akira sucked in a breath, flinching back from the lava flow before him, only for his foot to land on something spongy that gave a little beneath his weight. He glanced down to see flames licking at the sole of his shoe, and he choked on a cry preempting pain that never came.

Unnerved, he scrambled back to solid ground, heart hammering, and checked his foot for burns. Miraculously, there were none--not even a smudge to say that he'd just been standing on molten rock. He looked around, wondering if the lava field was some sort of hallucination--certainly it wasn't hot enough to be real.

The first thing he saw were the fissures: deep chasms running through the lava field, seemingly at random. They followed the path of lava flows and cut across them. Lava flowed into them like sluggish waterfalls, but it also continued on past the chasms, like it didn't care about the hole torn through this space.

Keith stood at the edge of one such chasm, lava flowing around his ankles, his hands limp at his sides and his ears swiveling in pursuit of some sound Akira couldn't hear.

"Keith!" Akira called. He gave no response. "Hey, Keith! What'd you find?"

Still nothing. Akira started toward him, careful to stay on the rocky outcroppings and the more solid-looking patches of hardened lava. Knowing this stuff wouldn't burn him couldn't override that particular human instinct that said, _Don't touch the lava._  He made it only halfway to Keith before he spotted Matt, kneeling on a rim of black stone, his eyes vacant as he stared out over the landscape.

Opening his mouth to call out, Akira took a step toward Matt, but froze as he felt a hand slide across his back.

_Akira._

He spun toward the voice, certain someone else was there, had snuck up on him, had leaned in to whisper in his ear. But there was no one. Just the empty lava field run through with fissures.

A rumble filled the air, and the ground beneath him gave a lurch, and he staggered back, feeling as though a hand had just grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. Somewhere, nearly lost beneath the thunder, someone was screaming.

He turned, already moving toward Matt once more, and nearly fell into a new fissure that had appeared between them, wider and deeper than the rest. He flailed his arms, fighting to catch his balance as a wave of vertigo took him. Looking into the darkness, it was like he was already falling, falling into nothingness.

It wasn't a chasm at all, he realized. It wasn't the ground opening up, splitting apart. It was a tear in the very fabric of this realm, a sudden void of matter. Even the lava that spilled over the edge into the chasm vanished into the darkness below.

And there was something else in the darkness. A presence. A mind brushing up against Akira's own. It called his name again, no longer a sound but a feeling, like someone leading him by the hand toward some greater destiny. He leaned forward, every cell in his body drawn toward the chasm, toward whatever lurked below. It would be so easy to fall in. To just... let go.

A hand closed around his wrist and yanked, and the lava field vanished.

The chasm, though, remained, the darkness filling his vision.

* * *

"How's she doing?"

Coran turned as Pidge stepped into the maintenance space--already cramped, but now even more so with all of Coran and Hunk's equipment set up all around. Tools, conduit, scanners and more littered the catwalk, a generator and specialized monitor squeezed into one corner. They'd gathered up as many fragments of Red's crystal as they could, suspended them in a gel base that would slow the Quintessence leech, though they couldn't stop it entirely. It was a stop-gap measure, mechanical life support for the dying lion, and Coran couldn't make himself walk away even though there was nothing more to do. He was afraid that if he took his eyes off her for even a moment, she would fade away.

Coran offered Pidge a smile, though he wasn't sure it was a very compelling one. "She's... holding on," he said. "Hopefully long enough for the others to get back with a new crystal."

Pidge picked their way across the catwalk to join Coran by the remains of the crystal. "But it's not as simple as switching out the crystals. That's what you said, right?"

"Unfortunately. But if your brother and the others find something in Oriande--some way to transfer her Quintessence, perhaps; the secret of how the lions were made in the first place... She might stand a chance."

Pidge's face was unreadable as they looked around the maintenance space. Their body, though, spoke to uncertainty--feet shuffling, arms wrapped around their midsection, shoulders pulling back toward the hatch that led outside. They'd spent very little time with the lions since Ryner's death, and even if this wasn't quite the same thing that had driven them to avoid Green, it had to be an unpleasant reminder. Even Coran could sense the Red Lion's pain hanging in the air like humidity on a summer day.

Slowly, Pidge edged toward the wall, stretching out their hand and placing it against a metal panel. "Hold on, girl," they whispered. "You're gonna be okay."

* * *

The light changed. For a long moment, that was all Matt could say with any certainty.

Squinting, he tried to make sense of where he was, of what was happening. The grass beneath him, the low-hanging clouds overhead and the wind that smelled like salt--none of it made sense. He'd been on Roya Vosar. He'd activated the tower, and stepped through the doorway. Then, nothing.

No, _nothing_  was to dilute a word for it. The absence he'd found waiting for him in the Heart had been oppressive, inescapable. He didn't remember reaching the Heart, didn't remember the lava field he'd found here last time--though he must have been there. The change in light... He'd been somewhere darker just a moment ago.

He couldn't see enough from where he was, kneeling on a patch of grass in a little hollow beside a path, to be sure he was on the island with the tower, but he assumed he was. Nyma must have found him and brought him here. Matt's knees shook as he climbed to his feet, trying to put the fragments of his memory together in a meaningful order. That was nearly impossible, though, when they all consisted of darkness and pain and an absence like a black hole that tried to draw him in.

Keith stood at the top of the hill, the wind ruffling his fur as he stared at something Matt couldn't see. Climbing the path toward him, Matt searched the horizon. They _were_ on the island; the tower was just up ahead, tall and gleaming white.

"Hey," Matt said, stopping beside Keith, who jumped. "You okay?"

"I don't know," Keith admitted. "That was..."

Matt grimaced. "Yeah. We're gonna help her, though. You'll see."

Shoes crunched on gravel behind them, and Matt turned to see Nyma there, her hand locked around Akira's wrist. Akira stumbled, and she caught him, her face scrunched up in irritation as he blinked and raised his free hand to his head.

"You good?" she asked. "Or am I gonna have to drag all your asses to Oriande myself?"

Matt trudged over as Akira turned toward Nyma, still blinking and clearly not all there. "Is it safe to assume you're the one who got us out of..." Matt paused. "Was that Red's Heart?"

"It was," Akira said. "It's starting to break apart. Can't have the Heart of the Red Lion without the Red Lion, right?"

Nyma bit down on whatever it was she'd been about to say, looking suddenly uncomfortable. "Well..." She huffed. "You're welcome, at any rate. You all looked like you were about to jump into the abyss."

Akira looked away at that, and Matt very nearly called him on it, except that Keith was lurking at his elbow, eyes haunted and claws plucking restlessly at the sleeve of his jacket. Matt glanced at him, his stomach turning over. "We're here, now. That's what's important." He nodded toward the tower ahead of them. "Shall we?"

Nyma rolled her shoulders and struck out up the path like she was marching to war. Matt followed her, touching Akira's arm as he passed and offering a sympathetic grimace. Keith dogged their steps, silent and withdrawn. Nyma stopped at the base of the tower and craned her neck to look up toward the tip of it.

"You know, I'm not sure this is actually the Heart," she said.

Matt frowned. "What do you mean?"

Nyma shook her head. "Feels different. Like, it's _almost_  what I expect, but not quite, like we're on a different layer of the astral plane or something."

"Is that a thing? I thought it was just, 'the astral plane,' all one thing."

Nyma scowled. "I don't know. This shit isn't my area, okay? But there's definitely something deeper than this. We went there when we went to help Meri. Like... there's the actual Heart of the Lions--that's the deepest layer. And then there's the island and the forest and the lava and whatever--it's still sort of the Heart, but just the surface layer. So maybe Oriande connects to an even more surface-surface layer. Copies the landscape but doesn't get the feel right." She wrinkled her nose. "Never mind. Let's just go."

She laid her hand on the white stone wall, and a doorway appeared once more. Matt stared at it in disgust. Oriande waited for him on the other side. Oriande, where he'd swore to never go again.

Oriande, where he might find his only chance of saving Red.

Nyma disappeared through the doorway, and Matt was the first to follow. He didn't want to go back, but for Red, he would walk into the fires of hell itself.

It was a more intimate reception area they landed in this time around. Less plush, less decorative--it looked less like a sitting room in some alien mansion and more like someone's office, complete with massive wooden desk. Matt, Keith, Akira, and Nyma had each been provided their own chair: padded, but not especially comfortable. An Altean sat behind the desk, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes soft with an impression of sympathy. She looked older than any other Altean Matt had seen, here or on New Altea, with thin white hair piled atop her head and deep wrinkles in her face and hands. Her swollen knuckles reminded him of his own grandparents, and the heavy gold jewelry she wore looked like it had seen better days.

Matt didn't recognize her from his last visit, but he did recognized that pseudo-sympathy, the almost patronizing way the people here dismissed the problems of the rest of the universe.

The Altean opened her mouth, but Matt cut across her.

"Save it," he said. Keith and Akira both jumped, staring first at Matt and then turning their attention toward the Altean. Nyma, who had already noticed their company, only shot a sidelong look Matt's way. Matt ignored them all. "Whatever you're going to say, I don't want to hear it. You already know why we're here, right? I mean, obviously. You probably already knew what this visit was about the _last_ time I was here. Could have given us a heads-up, but _no._ Wouldn't want to go spoiling the surprise."

"Matt," the woman began, overly-familiar in a way that grated on Matt's last nerve.

"Don't pretend you know me," he said. "And don't pretend you care. If you did, you'd have intervened before it came to Red killing herself to try to protect us from Keturah. You know about Keturah, too, don't you? And--" Matt paused, forcing himself to breathe. "I don't care. Just take me to Red."

The Altean waited for a beat to be sure he was done speaking, then spread her hands. "I'm afraid that's not possible."

"Bullshit," Matt said at once. "I know she's here. Some piece of her. Oriande was built to protect the _kotha_ spirits that make up the lions. That's what the Sage said last time we were here." Not that Matt had been with the others for that conversation, but he'd heard the summary.

The woman sighed. "I'm sorry. Let me start from the beginning. My name is Elorise. I've been on the Hospitality Team for a good few years now, as you might expect." She chuckled, seeming not to notice that her guests weren't laughing along. "You're right; we are well aware of the reason for your visit. We have been preparing for it for quite some time."

"Preparing for _what?_ " Matt asked, too tired to care that he was being rude. Red's absence chewed away at him, sapping his concentration and his patience. "To tell us that sometimes these things happen, and we shouldn't try to fix them?"

Elorise's brows knitted in concern. "Of course not. Voltron's time has not yet come, and we _do_ want to help. But right now the way to do that is not to go running off to the _kotha_. You must speak with the Sages first. They will answer your Questions."

"First?" Akira asked. "So you're saying we'll get to see Red after that?"

For the first time, Elorise hesitated. "Perhaps." She caught herself, and waved her hands, as though to dispel her own uncertainty. "We are getting into eventualities I am not privy to. All I know is that you must see the Sages first. They will know how to proceed from there."

Matt didn't want anything to do with the Sages, quite frankly, but it seemed nothing happened in Oriande without their blessing, so he reluctantly conceded the fight, letting Elorise sweep them along to familiar preparations: fittings for robes that had already been custom-made for each pilgrim, a review of the laws of Oriande (stay with the guide, don't try to find out about the future, and don't try to change the past. Same old bullshit as last time, and Matt had even less patience for it on the second repetition.)

"They aren't kidding about that part, by the way," Matt warned Keith, though part of him knew it was useless. Everything that was going to happen had already happened; Matt had witnessed it all first-hand. Still, he felt he owed it to Keith to try. "You get to close too interfering with past events and they just... pluck you out of the situation. Don't even give you the chance."

Keith frowned at that, but said nothing as he pulled on his robe. Matt only sighed and did the same.

* * *

" _Take_  a crystal? From the Balmera?"

Meri's voice did not adequately convey the horror Shay could hear in the song, but it was a close thing. Shay resisted the urge to fidget, instead maintaining eye contact with the Elders who had agreed to meet with them. She was grateful for the accommodation, and she was, now more than ever, glad she had not tried to make this request remotely.

"Yes," she said, refusing to let her eye wander to Meri, who was once more translating for them. "I understand this is not something to which you are accustomed--" (A truth; she did understand that fact, though it was difficult to empathize when she had never known a Balmera who had been allowed to keep all the crystals she produced.) "--but I can assure you what we ask is nothing like what the Empire has done to my home."

The song changed almost before Shay had finished speaking, sharpening with outrage and indignation. The words that followed were, if anything, far softer than Shay had expected.

"I am not sure you do understand, Elder Shay. The crystals are a part of the Balmera. To remove them--even just a few... We could not do that to our home."

Allura held up her hands, her tone far more soothing than anything Shay might have managed in the moment, and Shay remembered, again, that Allura had been born to this--to the politics, and the diplomacy. To leading her people and working with others. Shay had much to learn from her.

"Elders, your concern is well-founded, and I do not begrudge your caution. Were the situation any less dire, we would not be here now. I had hoped to speak with you about the possibility long before I asked you to actually act upon it--to establish together when and how crystals might be given, and what form the payment might take, before I or anyone else requested this of you. But the Red Lion is dying. Without a new crystal, we may not be able to save her, and without her, we lose Voltron, and all hope of defeating Zarkon's Empire.

"Even so, I would not ask this of you if I thought it might harm your home. On an industrial scale, and in the crude manner the Empire employs, it is harmful, yes. But a single crystal, freely given, with Meri and myself to return an equivalent measure of Quintessence to the Balmera herself, is not dangerous. A healthy Balmera would hardly notice the loss."

Shay waited for Bek to finish his translation, holding her breath. If she had hoped the Elders' attitude might change following Allura's speech, however, she was to be disappointed. They were still reluctant, guarded. They had seen the scars left by the mines on Metos, Theros, and Atsiphos now, and they feared acquiescing here would start them down that same path. Shay did not need words to understand that.

"Be at peace, Elders," she said, after the silence had dragged on too long for comfort. Irritation sparked in her, but she tamped it down. "We did not come here with the intent to force you to surrender a crystal. If your answer is no, we will take our leave."

"And what?" Meri asked, translating a startlingly quick reply. "You said it yourself. You cannot afford to lose the Red Lion."

"Theros will give the crystal," Shay said, placing her hands on the table and standing. "She has done it before, and suffered no ill. I would prefer not to take of her again so soon, just as I would not ask you to give a second crystal before the first could be replaced, but if my home is the only one willing and not so injured she cannot afford it, then we will do what we must."

The declaration seemed to take the Elders aback--or perhaps it was the bite behind Shay's words, a bite she suspected extended into her song. Allura and Meri, too, seemed surprised by Shay's words. In truth, it was unlike her. She did not mean to be sharp with the Elders here; her people owed them a great deal, and she would be forever grateful for it. But she was tired, and she was afraid, and the longer they debated, the less chance they had to save Red. She bowed her head to the Elders, then turned for the door.

_Pax._

The word--the _impulse--_ echoed in the song, so potent Shay stopped in her tracks a full ten seconds before Meri spoke aloud.

"Peace, Elder Shay," Meri translated. "We have not said no to your request."

Shay turned, cautiously optimistic. "You have not yet said yes, either."

One of the Elders sighed, and they all exchanged meaningful looks, the song layered through with currents Shay couldn't begin to pick apart.

"We will not lie," Meri said when at last Bek began to type. "We are uncomfortable with the idea. But if you are confident it would not harm your home, after all she has suffered... We will allow you to ask." Meri paused, her nose wrinkling. "Ask? Isn't that what we're doing?"

Shay shook her head. "They will allow us to ask the Balmera," she said. "The Elders may deny our request, but only the Balmera herself can grant it." She nodded to the Elders. "Thank you. I understand that entering the Balmera here is not the same as on my home. Would you show us the proper way to prepare ourselves?"

"Of course," the Elders replied. "It would be our honor."

* * *

The preparations were a rather somber affair--not that the circumstances were not already dire, but these Balmerans treated entry into the depths as a truly sacred act. Religious, even. The atmosphere was that of some ceremonies Shay had witnessed in her time as paladin wherein locals communed with their gods.

(Had it been anywhere but a Balmera, Shay would have understood at once. To step inside the body of a sentient being that sustained your very way of life was no small thing. It was only that she had grown up within the tunnels of Theros, venturing all the way to the Heart Chamber, hearing the voice of her home all around--the voice not of a god, but almost of a grandmother--that made the solemnity of this journey feel so misplaced.)

Yet for all the solemnity, preparations were blessedly brief. The Elders brought them to a small shrine at the edge of the city. It was not ornate, just a simple wooden fence, adorned with strings of luminous bulbs, a hut like a gatehouse at one end, and a spring housed within. Even this was simple: a basin of stone. An outcropping to one side. Water so clear Shay could see the veins of crystal in the stone bottom of the pool.

They washed in the pool, then dried themselves, and dressed in special robes made of something cool and silky. In cut, it was not so different from the tunics Shay had seen around the city--looser and more ornate than the tunics her own people had worn for so long, but hardly formal attire by most peoples' standards.

The fabric, however, was a soft, crystalline blue--and the embroidery around the collar and sleeves almost managed to replicate the sheen of newly-budding Balmera crystals.

They were given glass orbs to light their way--not crystals, though they reflected, _multiplied_ , the crystals' light to such a degree that they might as well have been. The Elders did not accompany them inside. Apparently it was an insult to enter these tunnels without cause, and the Elders did not consider themselves to have cause. It was a mark of their trust in Shay and her friends, and it was a mark of respect for the Balmera. The paladins would receive the crystal they needed, or they would not, and that was enough for the Elders.

They went in barefoot--not unusual for Balmerans, but the Elders insisted on it for Allura and Meri, who left their shoes behind without complaint. Their feet were not accustomed to walking on stone, but they stepped lightly and kept pace, and Shay did her best to steer them along the smoothest paths.

It was silent inside the Balmera in a way Shay's home never was. There was no murmur of voices, no patter of feet or pulse of life. Even the song was muted, the voices from the surface muffled and withdrawn, as though these Balmerans consciously tried to keep their voices away from the heart of their home. It was... uncomfortable.

But here, at least, the Balmera song rose crisp and clear, unmuddied by the conversation of an entire Balmera's population. There was still nuance to it that Shay knew she was missing, but she was able to pick it all apart just a little better than she had from the surface. The Balmera was curious. She watched the visitors closely, trying to pick out their intent, and she was confused that Meri and Allura had no voice in the song. Shay did her best to explain things to the Balmera--who they were, what they needed. She thought of the Vkullor and the damage it had done; she thought of Voltron, the only chance they had to stop all the pain.

 _We need your help,_ Shay thought, letting her desperation lay plain in the song. _I know this isn't something anyone has ever asked of you..._

Understanding was slow to dawn in the Balmera, but eventually she figured out the course of Shay's thoughts. She quailed, at first, recoiling from the notion of giving up a piece of herself. She shared her old, spent crystals with the surface, of course, but those were only baubles. They might give some light, they might look nice, but they served no function; not like the living crystals beneath her skin. Those she guarded jealously. A few veins of crystalline particles ran through the walls of this tunnel, but even here Shay could not see whole crystals of any considerable size. They were not _to_ be seen. They were the Balmera's alone.

It was a strange view of it, and it reminded Shay again that her people had, of necessity, grown desensitized to the horrors the Empire had inflicted upon them, and upon their Balmera. Strangers were not meant to walk these halls. Mortals were not meant to see the crystals--and to _use_ them, to _take_ them, was an affront so deep it should have made anyone ill.

Sorrow and shame slipped into Shay's song before she could stop them, and she flushed, snatching her hand back from the wall where she had placed it. Meri and Allura watched her expectantly, and Shay had to turn away, lest they see the conflict within her.

Cautiously, she returned her hand to the wall and sang of resignation and an apology. She willed this Balmera to understand that she would not take the crystal by force--not ever, even if she had no other options.

(Curiosity rose in the song at the notion of alternatives.)

Shay smiled sadly as she thought of her home. She sang, and it was easy to put this into the song, for Theros's song had so long been part of her life that she did not have to think before it came spilling out of her-- _home_ , and _family_ , and _sacrifice_ , and _offering_ , and _love._ Theros should not have to give more, when so much had already been taken from her, but she would, and Shay would ensure the giving was easy and the care that followed more than merely sufficient.

Strains of Theros's song echoed back at her, somehow richer in the multilayered voice of this Balmera. _You love your home,_ she seemed to say.

 _I do._ Shay filled her song with conviction and agreement.

The Balmera quieted, and still Theros's song rose and fell in the soft melodies.

Finally, acquiescence.

Shay fell silent, too stunned even for the song.

The crystalline veins around her glowed brighter, their reflected light dancing in the orb Shay held. _Come,_ that light seemed to say. _I will give you what you seek._

* * *

Oriande was too bright. Every pristine white wall, every fountain glittering in the harsh sunlight, was like a dagger driving deep into Keith's skull. He hunched his shoulders and drifted a little closer to Akira with every step. The streets were too loud, too crowded, and with everything inside Keith already screaming every second with Red's absence, all he wanted was for it all to go away.

Their guide had made an attempt at small talk when they first set out from the building at the top of the hill, but none of them were in a conversational mood--not even Akira, who normally would have taken it on himself to ease the tension. Now he just returned their guide's questions with a flat look and monosyllabic answers. Nyma glared at them outright, occasionally muttering insults under her breath but mostly just forming a prickly living wall between the guide and the rest of the group. And Matt ignored it all, his eyes scanning the crowd around him as though he expected to stumble across Red somewhere between here and the temple they were headed for.

Keith watched his friends with the pit in his stomach growing larger every second. Sooner or later, he was going to be sick, and he wished he could just get it over with. He didn't like this place. He didn't like the people here, with their plastic smiles and gentle deflections and eyes that said they didn't actually care that Keith was being ripped apart at the seams. Every step hurt, physically _hurt_ , and his lungs couldn't seem to hold enough air to chase away the darkness creeping in around the edges of his sight.

He just wanted it all to end.

Matt tensed suddenly, frozen in the middle of massaging the same headache that had clamped itself around Keith's skull. He muttered a curse, and Keith tried to scrounge up the will to ask what was wrong--but then Matt was gone, disappearing into the crowd like water flowing through the gaps, and all Keith could do was stop and stare after him, his mind slow to process what had just happened.

Akira wasn't so slow on the uptake. He turned in the direction of Keith's gaze, tensing like a predator on the hunt, and cursed as he plunged into the crowd after Matt. Their guide--Keith had already forgotten their name--spluttered a protest and started after them. They made it two steps before they stopped, turned, and jabbed a finger at Keith and Nyma.

"Stay here," they said. "I'll get them and circle back." They pursed their lips, arched their eyebrow, and then they were gone, jostling others in the crowd as they chased after Matt and Akira.

Nyma stepped up beside Keith, her arms crossed. She considered the guide's retreating form for a moment, then glanced down at Keith and tilted her head toward the crowd as though to ask if he wanted to follow.

He didn't, but standing still was actual agony right now, so he shrugged and plunged in, contorting himself between every step in an attempt not to brush up against too many people here. Nyma had no such qualms and barreled ahead, shouldering people out of her way and leaving open air in her wake for Keith to settle into.

He kept on his guard, eyes and ears swiveling constantly. Without Red's fire inside him, everything felt uncertain, and in a crowd like this, full of strangers all dressed in the same enveloping robes, danger could be anywhere. He didn't think Oriande would let any real threats in--not after all the trouble they'd had to go to to get here--but he didn't trust these people as far as he could spit.

Nyma slowed, and Keith turned, wondering if they'd finally caught up to Matt and Akira. They had, but that wasn't what caught Keith's eye. There was another Matt--wide-eyed and a little pale, his eyes darting from Matt to Akira to the rest of them. Allura, Val, and Edi stood around him, along with another Altean guide, who looked even more panicky than Matt. Past Matt.

Keith's chest went tight, but this time, it wasn't the pressing awareness of Red's dying presence that left him breathless.

"You're-- You're from before, aren't you?" he asked, his voice seeming to come from far away. "Back when Lance and I were still on the homeworld." Back when everything was still how it was meant to be. Before Keturah was their enemy, before she was inside Keith's head. Before Red had killed herself to get Keturah out.

(He knew--he _knew_ \--that she'd been in his head even back then. Maybe her hold on him hadn't been strong enough to take control, or maybe she just hadn't wanted to tip her hand, but either way he hadn't been safe, just like this Matt wasn't safe. Only ignorant.)

Keith started forward, his chest bursting with everything he had to tell them. If they knew--if they had a chance to change things--

Matt grabbed his arm to stop him. "Keith."

"Don't--" Keith ripped his arm away, breathless. His legs shook, like Red had taken his strength with her when she'd shattered her crystal. "Don't give me that. Isn't this what we were hoping for? A way to change things?"

Both guides stiffened at that, the other group's babbling out something she probably meant as a distraction. Keith ignored her and snarled at his guide as they stepped forward, a warning in their clenched fists.

"Keith," Akira began, holding up his hands.

"No!" Keith cried. "We have to warn them!" There was more he wanted to say, more he wanted to ask. Didn't the others get it? They could hope for a way to heal Red, but none of them knew if that was even possible. But if they could prevent it ever happening--if they could tell them everything the Sages of Oriande should have told them in the first place... "Listen to me." He caught past Matt's eyes and poured everything he had into his words, begging him to listen, to _do_ something. "Haggar's Keturah. She--"

Keith's voice faltered as the world burned around him. Hardly two syllables into his warning, and everything was gone. The buildings, the crowd, his friends from the past, even the ones who had come with him. He stood, alone, in a blank white space. He couldn't call it a room, because there were no walls, but neither was there a sky to say he was outside.

It was just white. Solid, flat, and featureless. Wisps of cloud curled around his legs, teased him like shadows of motion in his periphery. He turned, searching for the source of the shadows, his fur standing on end with the sensation of being watched. His breath came short and shallow, his ears falling back flat against his skull. He felt emptier than ever, his legs barely supporting his weight, and he stumbled back, searching for cover that didn't exist.

Something started to coalesce in the clouds--long and lithe, crouched low to the ground, eyes burning like stars. Keith tripped over his next step and went down hard, his hand reaching out, grasping for a bayard that didn't come. _Wouldn't_ come. The bayard was a manifestation of the bond, tied to Red. Without her, it wouldn't answer his call, and it didn't matter that he'd always left the bayard for Matt before; he felt naked without it now, stripped bare and powerless before whatever creatures lived in this blank space where reality didn't sit quite right.

Eddies in the clouds warned of motion behind him, and Keith spun, leaping to his feet and throwing up his hands in a feeble defense--but it was only Akira, who shoved the hood of his robe back and held up his hands in a calming gesture.

"Hey," he said, his voice low but strained. (They all felt that strain, didn't they? They were all tied to Red, and she was bleeding out, barely clinging to life, and it was draining all of them, bit by tattered bit.) "It's just me. Matt said it was Oriande's censors that took you away--some sort of self-defense mechanism for the continuity of space-time. I tripped them deliberately so it would bring me here." His lips quirked into a smile. "Lovis is gonna murder me when we get back."

Keith stared at him, his heart still pounding, his head still aching with everything that was too much and too pressing and nothing did anything to change the fact that his lion was _dead_ if he couldn't figure out a way to change it.

Akira's smile slipped away. "Are you okay?"

" _No,_ " Keith said, because he wasn't, and it was stupid of anyone to think he was, Akira least of all. He grit his teeth against the tears burning behind his eyes, but everything was still wrong, his heart wrung out and ragged, his emotions in a knot he didn't know how to begin to untangle, even his body failing like it was dying right along with Red. He hated to admit how broken he was, but he simply didn't have the energy to pretend otherwise.

Akira closed the distance between them in an instant, pulling Keith into a hug that sapped the last resistance from Keith's muscles. He sagged against Akira, weakly clinging to his robe and screwing his eyes shut. He focused on his breathing, hating the way it wavered, and tried not to break down sobbing.

"I don't know what to do," Keith admitted, his voice cracking. "Coran doesn't know how to fix Red, and we can't go find her here, and we can't even warn ourselves about what's coming."

Akira wrapped his arms tighter around Keith's shoulders and quieted him with a sympathetic hum. "I know. I know it hurts, Keith. It sucks, and no one here is being helpful, but that doesn't matter. I'm going to make this right, okay? You don't need to worry, because I'm not going to let Red die."

Keith had his head down on Akira's shoulder, his breath turning stale in the narrow space between them. He blinked, something in him latching onto the steel core running through Akira's words, the rest of him shying away. He pulled back, blinking away tears to study Akira's face, but the clouds beside them shifted, and suddenly there was a figure within--a shadow of a figure, at any rate. It wasn't quite solid and wasn't quite definite, but it shifted its feet, and Keith's hackles rose at the sense that it was watching him. Judging him.

"If you came here to lecture us about messing with the past, don't bother," Akira said. "We already know it's not possible. Just... give us a minute, okay?"

The figure didn't move, and Keith shrank down against Akira, trying to make himself smaller. He'd never been one to back down from a fight--he'd much rather pick one and get it all out there in the open--but every piece of him felt so frail without Red there to bolster him. Akira bristled, puffing himself up and pulling Keith closer, and for a moment Keith thought he might give cloud-punching a try.

" _I get it_ ," Akira growled. "Go away."

After another weightless moment, the figure vanished, puffing away in a breeze Keith couldn't feel and leaving them alone again in the whiteness.

Keith groaned and dropped his head back onto Akira's shoulder. "Sorry I'm such a mess."

Akira tugged on the brim of his hood. "Don't apologize for that. It's not your fault."

Wrinkling his nose, Keith made a disgruntled and vaguely disagreeable sound, but he didn't have the brainpower to construct a counterargument at the moment, so he grudgingly conceded the debate to Akira. "You really think we're going to find something here that can save Red?"

Akira was quiet for a moment, one hand rubbing up and down the length of Keith's spine. "I think there are four of us, and none of us is going to take no for an answer," he said eventually. "If the Sages don't have an answer for us, we'll just... we'll do it ourselves. We're not going to let her die."

He wasn't lying, saying of _course_ they would find a magical fix. Keith appreciated that, even though the blind assurance might have been more comforting. Because Keith didn't have the first clue how to help Red. They _needed_ the Sages to have an answer, unless Akira had been studying ancient Altean alchemy in his spare time.

For several minutes, Keith just leaned into Akira, his eyes watering from time to time, his breathing slowly evening out as Akira continued to rub his back. It didn't touch the cavity in his chest where Red should have been, but it dampened the panic that had been building ever since Haggar's attack. By the time the white void faded and they found themselves back in the city, Keith was almost feeling steady enough to look Matt in the eyes.

"You're back," Matt said, standing at once from the bench where he'd been sitting with Nyma. She stood to follow him, dogging his every step like a bodyguard in the middle of enemy territory, and Keith was keenly aware of Akira at his shoulder. A quick glance around the plaza confirmed that the group from the past had already moved on, and their guide was visibly calmer for it.

"We're back," Keith agreed with a weak smile. He let Matt hug him, then pulled away and turned toward the guide.

"How much farther is it?"

"Not far," they assured him. "Five dobashes, ten tops. We can take the back roads. Won't have to fight the crowds that way."

Which of course meant they wouldn't be likely to run into anyone else from the past that Keith might try to spoil--but Keith didn't care. Quiet was good, and getting to the Sages with as few interruptions as possible was more important than whether or not the guide trusted him to keep his mouth shut.

"Fine," he said, stepping away from Akira before he could pull him into another hug. (If he had, Keith thought he might break down again, and he'd wasted enough time as it was.) "Let's go."


	15. Flames of the Phoenix

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Red is dying, and the paladins don't know how to save her. Shay, Allura, and Meri went to the free Balmera and secured a new crystal to sustain her while Keith, Matt, Akira, and Nyma went to Oriande. They don't know what they'll find there, but they desperately hope it will be enough to save Red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: this chapter marks the major character undeath warned for in the fic tags. There's still not a good spoiler-free way to explain it, so in short: it's non-graphic and not technically death, but the emotional fallout (which mainly happens in the chapters that follow this one) is significant. If you need more details than that, read the [master note linked in chapter one](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rQ2n_F4RMjvb3y69NhqM52S7tBIZl3kwN6yw20TpxCA/edit?usp=sharing). Be aware that this note does contain some spoilers for the ramifications of this event. There's also the [chapter summaries,](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONOvacvwBb13SZO3-sMtCbQzVEHWP0ej1oHgh7janDQ/edit?usp=sharing) which contain a summary by chapter. (No spoilers beyond this chapter as of posting.)

"Why didn't you say anything?" Nyma demanded the instant the Sage walked into the room. She was tired, she was pissed, and she'd been waiting in a tiny, dark room with three anxious Reds for forty-five minutes, and frankly, she didn't care if this woman was the queen of the gods-damned universe. Nyma wasn't about to dick around with niceties when the Red Lion was out there wasting away.

The sage stopped short as Nyma got up in her face, one hand raised in an abortive attempt to soothe Nyma's temper. She was smart enough to see that it was futile, though, and backed off, frowning as she closed the door behind her. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean."

"Fuck off." Nyma crossed her arms, standing her ground as the sage tried to edge into the room. Keith, Matt, and Akira had dropped down onto the little sofas and arm chairs that dotted this room, which made it hard for Nyma to shield all of them at once from Oriande's particular brand of bullshit--but she'd be damned if she didn't at least try.

The sage bristled at her tone. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to--"

"I'm afraid I don't give a shit." Nyma stepped forward. "You knew about Keturah. You must have. The entire _vrekking_  point of Oriande is to gather all of history in one place or whatever, right? Maybe the plebeian guides aren't privy to that sort of knowledge, but you?" She shook her head. "Look me in the eye and tell me that the sages don't all know exactly who Haggar is and what she's done."

The sage pressed her lips into a thin line. "Of course I know."

"Then why didn't you _say_  anything? You knew who she was. You knew she was still connected to Red, and what she was going to do. Matt was here a year ago. You could have warned him! Do you have any idea what not knowing _cost_ us? We wouldn't be _in_ this situation if we'd known! If we'd realized that Haggar was Keturah and Keturah was the red paladin, and that she could use the bond against Keith and Matt? We could have figured out a way to break her connection with Red that _wasn't_ 'kill an irreplaceable piece of the _only_ weapon that can stand up to Zarkon's empire!'"

The tirade did nothing to dispel her roiling fury, not least of all because the sage remained unmoved. She watched Nyma, head cocked to the side, and when Nyma finally stopped, a little bit breathless, the sage only blinked.

"Is that your Question, then?"

Nyma made a face. "Excuse me?"

"Your Question." The sage smiled. "Sorry. Let me start at the beginning. I am Sage Meloia. Perhaps this was not made clear to you upon your arrival, but every pilgrim to Oriande is permitted one Question of the sages during their visit. You may ask anything, so long as you do not seek knowledge of the future, and I will answer truthfully to the best of Oriande's collective knowledge. So I just want to be certain--is this the Question you wish to ask of me? Why we did not tell you of Keturah sooner?"

 _Gods,_  Nyma wanted to punch this woman in the face. She held back, flashing a toothy smile. "You know what? Fuck it. Yeah, that's my Question."

Meloia nodded. "We did not tell you because you were not ready." She held up a hand, apparently anticipating Nyma's retort, and went on. "I don't mean that you were emotionally unprepared to learn the truth. We do not judge whether people can handle truth or not, only whether the balance of history will be upset by the telling. And history could not simply ride out the waves of us revealing Keturah's game too soon."

Nyma scoffed. "Right, because the universe would be _so_ devastated by foiling Haggar's latest plot before it could turn into mass-murder."

" _No._ " Meloia's smile had vanished, and she fixed Nyma with a steely glare that stopped her voice in her throat. "The universe would have been devastated by the loss of Voltron before its time."

* * *

Allura didn't begin breathing again until Coran secured the last connection and Quintessence from the new crystal flooded Red's conduits. Dying systems started up again, and a placid blue glow settled into the walls around them.

"It worked?" she asked, because she didn't want to get her hopes up.

Coran traded looks with Pidge and Hunk, all three of them grim and silent, and Allura's heart fell. With a grimace, Pidge turned back to their computer screen, burying themself in the work that had had them occupied when Allura and the others arrived with the crystal.

"It worked," Coran said slowly. "But you understand that this is still only a temporary solution."

"Of course," Allura said, though knowing that didn't stop the queasy feeling in her stomach as she trailed a hand along the wall. She'd never been able to sense the other lions as strongly as she did Black, but she _had_ always been able to sense them. The pulse of their Quintessence in the air, an echo of their voices in her ear.

She could not sense Red now, not even in the limited way she had.

"The crystal solves the most immediate problem," Hunk said, patting the top of the new crystal. It was larger than the one that had been here before--nearly waist height, where the old one had only spanned the length of Allura's forearm, from her elbow to the tip of her fingers. As such, the new crystal didn't fit into the space where they still had the shattered crystal, suspended in a gelatinous mixture. Q-conduit ran across the catwalk in a hazardous nest, linking the new crystal to the main power grid, as well as directly to several core systems. "Without a crystal, Red was losing power--and not like the lions have ever lost power before. They've got all of the most critical systems inside special shielding with the crystal so none of them ever shut down entirely."

"Think of it this way," Pidge said without looking up from their computer. "The crystal is the heart and soul of the lion--her power source and her essence. Everything else inside that shield is like her brain."

Hunk nodded. "This stuff can keep going on minimal power, in a sort of hibernation state, but if it ever lost all power, we don't know what would happen. Some of it stores data in the Quintessence itself. When we restored power, _if_  we were able to get it running again, all of that might be gone."

"But we don't need to worry about that any longer," Coran said brightly. "With this new crystal, we've got all the Quintessence a lion could possibly need."

Allura closed her eyes, pain throbbing behind her breastbone. "But it doesn't mean she's out of danger."

"No," Coran said. "I'm afraid it doesn't."

Allura nodded. She'd known this already. A lion's crystal was irreplaceable, at least with the skill and knowledge they currently had access to. She hadn't actually expected Red's Quintessence to spontaneously transfer over to the new crystal--if she had, there would have been no point sending the others back to Oriande.

But... she had hoped for a miracle. Some part of her had.

Coran laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled. "We've bought her some time," he said. "And she's in a better position now for whatever solution there is to be found on Oriande. Now all we can do is wait."

Allura covered Coran's hand with her own and returned his smile. "I only hope we've done enough."

* * *

"The loss of _Voltron?_ " Nyma asked, her voice dripping with venom.

Keith looked on in morbid fascination, wondering how much longer this could go on before Nyma snapped.

"I'm sorry, but what the fuck? You're trying to tell me that if you'd warned us about Keturah, somehow we would have lost _Voltron_?"

Meloia nodded solemnly. "It is difficult for you to see the full picture from your linear perspective," she said--not a little condescendingly, and Keith shot an incredulous look at Matt, who seemed to want to stand up and hold Nyma back from physically assaulting the sage, but couldn't quite work up the energy. "Keturah cannot read minds."

"Well thank fuck for _that_ ," Nyma muttered. "Bitch doesn't need any more advantages."

Meloia's cheek twitched, and Keith wasn't sure if it was a smile or a snarl she was trying to hide. "Keturah _cannot read minds,_ " she repeated, a little more forcefully. "But she did have eyes on the Castle of Lions in the form of her AI, which we also would have had to warn you about, were we to intervene at all. Beyond that, she had a presence in the paladin bond through the Red Lion. And while she cannot now and never could read your thoughts, she was aware enough of your emotional state to have known the moment you discovered her secrets. The _instant_  you returned from Oriande, she would have struck, before you had a chance to oust her.

"Imagine, for a moment, what that would have looked like. The castle turning against you--not fleeing so Keturah could try to get at her chosen pilot for Dark Red, but turning everything it had against you. She would have wanted you panicked and in disarray so she had every opportunity to use the paladin bond. She'd not yet had as much practice manipulating it as she does now, but she had foothold enough to accomplish her goals."

"To destroy Voltron, you mean," Matt said. He sounded too tired to work up any real emotion, but Keith's ears dropped all the same.

Meloia nodded. "Thankfully, that is not a potentiality that came to be, so we cannot say precisely how it would have ended, but in every variation we've seen, you lost a portion of your team. Either Keturah succeeded in using Keith and Matt to slaughter their friends, or the rest of you were forced to kill them in self-defense, or Keturah made them kill themselves just to spite you."

"But I stopped that," Akira said. He faltered as the others turned toward him and dropped his gaze. "Red did. That's why she used me to destroy her crystal. That's why we're _here_."

"Yes," Meloia said. "And she was able to do that because you have been her adjunct for the better part of a year. You have learned to hear her voice and to respond, and she as woven herself into the fabric of your being. If Keturah had struck then, mere days after you'd been chosen, that bond would not have been strong enough to make a difference."

"So you decided to trade our lives for Red's," Keith said. He hunched his shoulders, staring at his shoes. "I'm not saying I _want_  to have killed anyone, or to have died, but--if you're supposed to guard the balance of history, or whatever, and if Voltron is the only thing that can stop Zarkon..." He dug his fingers into his hair and looked up. "You can replace paladins, given enough time. You can't replace Voltron. _We_  might have chosen to save our friends. Red _did._  Shouldn't _you_ be the one telling us we're expendable?"

"You're right." The sage waved a hand as Nyma started to froth again and Akira raised his head with a growl. "From a purely pragmatic standpoint, if it were a straight trade between one or two paladins' lives and that of one of the lions, we would preserve the lion. By any measure, it is in the best interests of the universe. Oriande exists to sustain Voltron, after all. Fortunately for you, this situation is not so straight-forward."

"What do you mean?"

Meloia pursed her lips. "For starters, the Red Lion is not yet dead. There is a chance to save her yet. And even if we had sacrificed you, Red might still--"

"How?"

The sage turned toward Keith, her eyes an intense red-violet that made him squirm in his seat. "How, what?" she asked.

Keith licked his lips. "You said Red's not dead yet. That we can still save her. How do we do that?"

"Is that--"

"Yes, that's my Question," he snapped. "That's the whole vrekking reason we _came_!"

Meloia was silent for a long moment, staring more _through_  Keith than at him, and he could only hold her gaze for a few moment before it became too much. He dropped his eyes to her hands, which were folded at her waist. She held a length of chain in her hands, a glass orb the width of her thumb suspended in the middle. As the silence stretched, she wound the chain around the fingers of first one hand, then the other.

"I wish I could give you a simple answer," she said at length. "I hope that you believe me when I say that. In this of all things, I would not dance around the matter if there were any way to help it. Voltron is a lynchpin in history's course. More than that, it is the very foundation of Oriande. Everything we do, we do in accordance with Voltron's will."

"Bullshit," Matt said. "Red would never let Keturah do the things she's done. Not if she had a choice."

"Your Red has a far more personal stake in the matter, you must admit."

Keith frowned. " _Our_ Red?"

Meloia nodded. "The Red you know and the Red we of Oriande know are... two facets of the same crystal, shall we say. At their core, they are the same, and they share enough substance to be of one mind on most matters. But our Red is one stepped removed from the goings-on in the outside universe. She is aware of the things her other self suffered at Keturah's hands, but she is able to remain objective about the matter--though in most every case it leads to the same decision regardless. For instance. Your Red lied to you about her former paladin's supposed death, hid the things she had suffered and the truth about Keturah. She did this out of shame and fear. Our Red has no emotional investment in Keturah's fall, and so has no particular reason to lie about the mistakes she made. Nevertheless, she agrees with her decision to withhold the truth from you for precisely the same reason we declined to inform your friends of Haggar's true nature during their last visit."

"Cool," Nyma interjected. "How does any of this help us save Red?"

Meloia opened her mouth, then shut it once more. "Apologies. I got off track." She glanced down at the chain twined around her fingers, rubbing the glass sphere with one thumb. "There is a way for you to save the Red Lion. However... I cannot tell you what it is."

Keith shot to his feet, his fists clenching at his sides. "I thought you had to answer our Questions."

"I do." Meloia stared at him, unflinching. "And I am. Truthfully and to the best of our collective knowledge. Unfortunately, this is not something knowable to Oriande as it exists today."

Her voice wavered at the end, and Keith took a step back, his anger burning away in a flash and leaving something thin and quavering behind. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Meloia closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Her hand closed around the glass sphere on her chain. "Today is my last day."

"Your last day...?" Matt asked.

A nod. "We try not to keep track of it. When tens of thousands of days overlap, it's difficult to establish a clear timeline other than your own personal history. You can pick out which versions of you are from a day you've already lived, and so you can get a general sense of what's yet to come, but no one cares to look at the _next_  day... Until there is none." Meloia breathed again, her shoulders rising and falling with it, and opened her eyes. "I am the last version of myself anywhere in Oriande. A few of the other sages have been able to pinpoint the same. Tomorrow when I wake up, _if_  I wake up, I fear it will be to a much different world than the one I have known for most of my life."

Keith shook his head, trying to make sense of her words. "What do you mean, _if_  you wake up?"

"Exactly as it sounds. I have already lived all my allotted days in this city. There is no more future for me to cross paths with. I have not been able to pin down what I will do for the rest of today; I know I will leave the temple early, will see no more pilgrims after you. This evening, I will make my way toward the city limits. Then..." She spread her hands, the chain dangling between the fingers of one closed fist. "Either I die, or something happens to Oriande. I suspect it is the latter. I suspect..."

She returned her gaze to Keith, and he felt as though she were staring into his very soul.

"I suspect it has to do with the Red Lion," she said. "You will save her, and in so doing, you will fundamentally change the way Oriande works. The way _Voltron_  works."

"I... I don't understand."

"Voltron is what it is because the spirits of the lions live here, outside of time. Without that protection..." Meloia shook her head. "I don't know. No one does. Voltron has never existed without Oriande. I can tell you one thing for certain: in saving the Red Lion, you will make Voltron itself mortal."

"It was already mortal," Akira said, his stony voice cutting through the tension Meloia's words had left hanging over the room. Keith turned to find Akira still seated, his elbows resting on his knees. He was glaring at Meloia. "If we don't save Red, there is no more Voltron. Not 'eventually,' not 'maybe.' Now. Forever."

Meloia flinched, picking up the dangling end of her chain again and turning her head aside. "Of course. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I only want to ensure you know the cost of what you seek."

"I know," Akira said. " _We_  know. We're going to do it anyway."

"You still haven't answered Keith's Question, though," Matt said. " _How?_  It doesn't help to know that it's supposed to happen, or that it's gonna fuck everything up. If you don't know what we're going to do, can you at least tell us what the ancient Alteans did last time? How did they make the crystal that got shattered? Can we make another?"

"Unlikely," Meloia said. "Those crystals were created when the last great perekotha divided herself into the five _kotha_ that make up Voltron. The crystals weren't manufactured, or grown. They are concentrated Quintessence, a physical manifestation of the lions' consciousness that roots them in linear space, created as a byproduct of the Fission. You can't make another any more than you could make another Red."

Akira clasped his hands together between his legs. "So, what? It's like some metaphysical transceiver? The lions' spirits are here, and the crystals just let them manifest in the Lion-robots. If we take the spirit, or a piece of it, something that's linked to it--wouldn't that be basically the same thing? Who says we need the crystal?"

Meloia went suddenly, eerily still, staring hard at Akira. "You are playing with fire, child. I'm not sure you realize."

"I do, actually." He smiled. "And while we're at it, I'm going to go ahead and waive my Question. I doubt you'd have an answer for me, anyway."

Keith glanced back and forth between Akira, who was smiling savagely, and Meloia, who seemed caught between indignation and unease. "Are you... Are you _certain?_ " she asked. "You needn't ask your Question immediately. I can give you time if you would like to think on it."

Akira, though, only shook his head. "I'm good. Matt?"

Matt seemed startled to be addressed directly and looked up at Akira in alarm. "What?"

"Your Question. Got something you'd like to ask the not-totally-omniscient sages of Oriande?"

Matt started to smile at Akira's quip, but it didn't last. He stared at his hands for a long moment, then sat up straight and raised his chin. "Why is Keturah the way she is? Why did she betray her team? What does she think she's going to accomplish with all of--" He waved his arm helplessly. "-- _this?_  Last time I was here, the sage I met showed me all these things that happened before Zarkon split with the team, and it helped me understand Zarkon and Alfor and Lealle. But I still don't understand Keturah. I don't know if I can _ever_  understand her, but..." He shook his head and firmed his jaw. "I want to know everything there is to know. I don't want her to have the upper hand anymore."

Meloia's face softened, and she nodded. "That I _can_ give you. Keturah's history with Oriande is a long one, but as you quite literally have all the time in the universe while you're here, I will show you everything I can."

She stretched out her hand, loosening her grip on her chain as she did so. The glass sphere bounced and swung at the end of a length of chain, flashing blue, and the whole side wall of the room they stood in vanished, puffing away like smoke in the wind. The city of Oriande spread out beyond--but the view wasn't what it should have been. Keith could see the temple of the Sages in the distance, as though they were back up on the hill where they'd entered the city.

The view shifted, and Keith had to sit down as his stomach heaved toward his throat. The illusion swept through the city, skimming over thousands of enrobed figures, each of them indistinguishable from one another, until Keith found himself looking at the old paladins, most of them visibly younger than they'd been in any image or memory Keith had seen from the early days of the war.

"The first time Keturah came to Oriande," Meloia said, "she seemed to harbor no malicious intent toward her teammates. It's impossible to know her mind, of course, but I doubt very much she had started down that dark path so early."

"Keturah, _look!_ " Sa squealed, wrapping his arms around hers and attempting to climb her body, apparently not noticing the way her face soured. "Is that Erybetican stonework?"

Keturah blinked at him, reaching over with her free hand to pry his hands off her arm one finger at a time. "I don't even know what that _is_. It just looks like some decrepit old pillar."

Sa gaped at her. " _Keturah_. You're _Altean_. Haven't you ever heard of the Erybeticans?"

Keturah stopped, still pinching one of Sa's fingers between her own and peeling it off her skin like an old bandage. "Should I have?"

"Ancient Altean ethnoreligious group," Lealle supplied, looping an arm around Keturah's neck. "They disappeared way before Altea started traveling through space, but their observations of Quintessence are still some of the best we have."

"And the script they used is one of the most widely studied--there are still people putting out new translations of some of their inscriptions." Sa hiked himself higher on Keturah's hip, his tail wrapping around her thigh for balance. "It looks like there's engravings on there. Do you think it's the real deal? It's gotta be a recreation, right?"

"Why don't you go find out?" Keturah said, grating out a smile. She staggered when Sa leaped off her, and Lealle laughed as she steadied her. "Where does he get that much energy?"

Lealle grinned. "Oh, come on. He's basically still a kid. Cut him some slack."

Keturah arched an eyebrow in her direction, but their attention was soon drawn back to Sa and to Zarkon, who had made the mistake of drifting too close to Sa and the pillar he was observing. Sa bounded up onto Zarkon's shoulders in under a second, stretching up on on his toes with his tail lashing behind him as he squinted at something etched at the very top of the pillar. Zarkon wrapped his hands around Sa's ankles to steady him.

Keturah shook her head, but she couldn't hide the smile growing on her face.

"See?" Lealle said, jabbing her in the side. "Admit it. You think it's cute."

Keturah sobered at once. "I do not."

"Uh-huh." Lealle tucked her hands behind her back and started walking, a lackadaisical, rolling gate that sent her crashing into Keturah on more than one occasion. "So what Question are you gonna ask?"

"I don't know yet."

"Oh, come on. You must have _some_  idea."

Keturah wrinkled her nose. "I have lots of ideas. That's the problem. Do _you_  have any idea what you're going to ask?"

"Of course."

Keturah whipped her head around, and Lealle burst out laughing.

"What? I do! Look, you and Sa are the ones who always want to know things. All I want to know is how to be a good teammate."

Meloia sighed, startling Keith out of the illusion. He tore his gaze away from the old paladins and looked to Meloia, who seemed to have aged a hundred years from watching the scene.

"Keturah wasn't always evil," she said. "But she has always been smart, and resourceful, and she learned things on this trip that she would twist to her advantage later in life."

The image changed again, showing the paladins elsewhere in the city, this time with Matt, Val, and Edi there with them. Allura was nowhere to be seen--but Matt and Keturah had pulled away from the rest of the group, regarding each other with interest and trying not to be too obvious about it. They spoke, and though Keith couldn't hear their words, Matt--the real Matt, seated on a couch a few feet away--flinched at the sight.

"She learned of the paladins who would succeed her and her friends," Meloia said. "One of them Allura, but two others a species she had never encountered before, all of them stiff and awkward around the present team. She knew something had happened."

Again the scene shifted, and now Keturah stood in a room much like this one, together with Rukka, Lealle, and Alfor. She pursed her lips, searching the ground as though she might find a revelation there, and then finally lifted her head. 

"How do the Lions work? Voltron--the paladin bond--we use it every day, but we've barely scratched the surface of what it is we're actually doing. I don't just want to use it. I want to _understand it._ "

Behind her, Alfor beamed, puffing up like a proud father. Lealle squeezed Keturah's wrist, beaming, and Rukka nodded as the Sage turned to accept a stack of books from the attendant waiting outside the door.

"We obliged her request," Meloia said. "Of course we did. She was a paladin of Voltron, and she sought to deepen her understanding of the duty she had sworn herself to." She stared at the illusion as the Sage gestured for Keturah to take the books, talking all the while. "Sage Klevvi was young, and even now only a small fraction of us know the path Keturah chose. He had no idea the power he was giving her when he handed over the collected records of the creation of Voltron. He had no idea she would use them thousands of years later to create her own bastardized copy."

Nyma's face did a curious sort of twitch as she leaned back against the wall, one foot hooking behind the other. "Don't tell me you're actually admitting to making a mistake."

Meloia's brow furrowed. "We are not infallible. However much we strive to make the right choice, we are only mortals, and sometimes we fail. Klevvi would be the first to admit that this was one such time."

"But this is all happening _right now_ ," Keith said, a frustrated growl creeping into his throat. "If you recognize the mistake, why don't you just _go over there_  and stop her from getting those records?"

"Oriande exists in a delicate balance. Past and present intertwine, but if we start trying to alter the past--our own pasts most of all--the entire system breaks down. When nothing is immutable, then reality itself becomes malleable. Our younger selves were foolish, yes. We came from the outside universe, having lived our whole lives according to a linear experience of time. For many of us, for many years, we tried to approximate that same experience here. Our youngest iterations dealt with the earliest visitors, which meant that Keturah's first visit was assigned to a very young Sage, and no one involved had thought to look ahead to see what her subsequent visits might entail.

"It was only on her second visit that we realized she was dangerous, and that she might exploit the system we had going. That was the cycle we changed things, and every iteration that followed understands these things. We keep our younger selves in the dark to preserve the integrity of Oriande, but don't think for a second we don't wish we had realized in time to step in."

No one spoke for a long moment, and Keith didn't think he was the only one who found her explanation unsatisfying at best.

"You mentioned a second visit," Akira said at length. "How many times did you help the most evil person to ever live, exactly?"

Meloia's lips pursed. "She came to us three times. First as an honest pilgrim, then a second time, decades later. By then, she had changed."

The illusion in the wall rippled, the crisp white lines of Oriande bleeding as though someone had spilled ink over them. A moment later, it showed a night sky, a small city on a planet that must have been in the early stages of space travel. It was not a primitive planet, by any means, not even a planet just growing into its own. Keith recognized Altean ships in the space ports, deep space transmitters on massive towers outside the city, a bright and gleaming downtown full of technology that may well have been cutting edge for its time.

But none of it matched the rest of the city, or the suburbs stretching out into the surrounding hills. The architecture here was different, buildings made of brick and stone, machines that ran on cruder power cells than the crystals whose glow turned downtown a soft shade of blue. It was as though someone had plopped an advanced spaceport in the middle of a city two hundred years in the past, and the new technology had yet to permeate the rest of this world.

Keturah sat in a bar in the suburbs, the orange tint of the overhead lights giving her skin a ruddy cast. She wore plain clothes--no paladin armor, no finery or jewels. She wasn't here as a soldier or a diplomat, and she seemed, if anything, to want to blend in.

A man sat beside her at the bar--one of the locals, judging by his tawny fur and floppy ears. He knocked back a drink, grimacing at the taste, as Keturah ignored her own glass beside him.

"Keturah had long been interested in the paladin hopefuls who came to the castle-ship," Meloia said. "She trained them. Spoke with them. Zarkon and Alfor came to trust her judgment when choosing candidates for more personalized instruction. Rkhaeum had been one of her star pupils--best suited to the Red Lion, but of course Keturah was still in her prime, and he would die long before she was ready to step down. She steered him toward Black instead. He was Zarkon's foremost rival for the spot, and many of the paladins were surprised when Black chose Zarkon over Rkhaeum."

"What happened to him?" Keith asked.

Meloia sighed. "He remained on the castle for a year or two. Continued to train with the other hopefuls. It was custom at the time to always have candidates at the ready in case of tragedy. But time moved on. Rkhaeum grew older, had more trouble keeping up with the brutal pace of training. New candidates rose in the ranks to fill openings as the older hopefuls received commissions in the Guard or went into politics or humanitarian aid.

"Rkhaeum was bitter after being denied a place among the paladins, and when he left the castle, he cut all ties with his former friends. Keturah ran into him by chance when Voltron was visiting his home planet of Gtynui, and she soon realized that he was no longer the idealistic young man she had helped to train."

"There are three hundred and sixty-eight systems in the Alliance," Rkhaeum said, dropping his hand to the bar and wincing as the glass hit the countertop with a clack. "More than a thousand recognized species. Do you know how many of them have been represented even once among the paladins?"

Keturah stared into her glass. "I couldn't give you a number--"

"Nine." Rkhaeum's voice rumbled, gravel tumbling down a metal chute. "Hundreds of years of service, Keturah. Dozens of paladins. Until two generations ago, nearly every one of them was Altean. You still hold more of the Lions than any other species. And ninety-nine percent of the Alliance is ruled by this elite."

"Voltron is not a governing body," Keturah said. "We are peace keepers."

"Tyrants," Rkhaeum shot back. "Soldiers who outclass every other force in the Alliance and refuse to share their technology. An oligarchy who votes on who gets to toss their name into a cup for a spot on the team."

Keturah bristled. "The Lions choose their pilots."

"And your king goes out of his way to ensure that the Lions only ever see the candidates _he_ wants them to see."

"You expect us to compare every being in the universe each time someone steps down?"

"I expect King Alfor to remember that he is not king of the entire universe. No one wants him here. Most people are just too cowardly to do anything about it."

Keturah reared back, shooting a wary look around the bar. " _Rkhaeum,_ " she snapped. "It's not like you to talk like this."

He raised his empty glass in toast, then waggled it in the bartender's direction. "Well, I tried playing by the rules, and that didn't get me anywhere. Now it's time to ask a little more forcefully."

Keturah went quiet as the bartender refilled Rkhaeum's drink. She watched him raise it to his lips and knock it back in a single shot. 

"What are you planning?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

Rkhaeum glanced at her, considering, then broke into a grin. "I like you, Khtah. So do yourself a favor and steer clear of the embassy tonight. You're too good to get caught up in this mess."

The scene dissolved, and Keith turned back to Meloia, his mouth running dry. "She sided with him?" he guessed. "Sold out her friends because someone was pissy he didn't get picked." The words tasted sour in his mouth, insincere. Nine species, out of all the universe. They didn't even have that many on the team now, though it had more than doubled in size. Had Rkhaeum been right? Was Voltron just too small to ever honestly call itself the defender of the universe?

Meloia stopped that line of thought with a shake of her head. "No. Keturah went straight to Alfor when she left the bar. Rkhaeum and a small group of co-conspirators were arrested on their way to the embassy. They were executed for their crimes.

"But Rkhaeum's words must have stuck with Keturah. In the years that followed, she began to distance herself from her team. Challenged Zarkon and Alfor on their decisions--openly at first, and then couching her objections in political velvet. She took to studying magic in secret, improving her skills without letting on how far she had progressed." Meloia sighed. "It's not that we cannot sympathize with Rkhaeum's frustration, but his answer was violence, and Keturah's was to blame everyone but herself. She came to regard Alfor as a tyrant, Zarkon as a warlord. The other paladins were complicit, in her eyes, as was everyone on the castle--but she never once tried to change things. I think she was afraid that change meant stepping down, and yielding the Red Lion to someone else. And that was something she could not do--not then, and not now. 

"So instead, she set out to destroy it all."

Decades passed in the course of seconds. Keith watched Keturah age--far less than Zarkon and Sa and Rukkah aged around her, but time began to show on her face. He watched her train her magic in secret--learning to control the fire, learning to wield raw Quintessence, gathering arcane texts from all corners of the universe, some of which dealt with blood magic and other things Keith didn't recognize, but which chilled to his bones.

He watched her draw a mask over her true intentions when she was around her team. They thought time had cooled her recklessness, but she had only tempered it. She ingratiated herself to Zarkon until he trusted her beyond any other. She offered herself to Alfor as a tactician to gain his ear.

And then she turned them against each other.

"We could take the whole day to look at how Keturah engineered the rift between Zarkon and Alfor," Meloia said, watching the silent snapshots with something like grief in her eyes. "I could show you dozens of requests for aid that Keturah snatched off Alfor's desk, deleted from his account. I could show you all the seeds of doubt she placed in Zarkon's mind over the course of years, waiting patiently for them to fester and grow.

"But you already know that story. Alfor failed to help Daibazaal in its time of need. Zarkon blamed him for it. Their pride made it an insurmountable division. All you need to know is that Keturah goaded them both into it. She wanted to destroy Voltron, and she knew that the only thing that could stand against a lion was another lion."

Akira rolled his hand. "So she started a war, and Alfor kind of fucked her plans when he sent the rest of the lions into hiding. Can we speed this up?"

Meloia stared at him for a long moment, her face utterly unreadable, but then she sighed. "Very well. A hundred years passed. The Red Lion shut Keturah out, and the other four were lost to the endless reaches of the universe. Zarkon was determined to reclaim them all--first out of some misguided altruism. The general consensus is that in those early years he truly thought he could lead Voltron into a new era of prosperity for those Altea had failed. It was only as his passion turned to obsession and a thirst for control that he became a tyrant in his own right.

"I can say no such thing of Keturah." Meloia waved her hand, and the scenes beyond the wall shifted into darker and darker images. Keturah's _glaes_  bled, the whites of her eyes turned yellow, her body withered. "Keturah was not content to let Voltron be lost. She wanted to find it and destroy it once and for all. As Zarkon grew older and amassed power as the head of the fledgling Galra Empire, Keturah delved deeper and deeper into her magic, twisting the Pygnarat arts into something they were never meant to be. She extended Zarkon's life, and then her own, and began to hide her true identity. She took on the name Haggar, and withdrew into the shadows. Not even Zarkon knew all of her projects. He certainly didn't know she had begun to search for the last of the Vkullor."

"Way back then?" Matt asked. "How did she know there was anything to find?"

The violet-tinted darkness of the memories changed, for an instant, to the blinding white of Oriande. Zarkon stood in this temple, younger and more earnest, with Sa at his side.

Meloia turned to the paladins. "Do you know what Zarkon Asked, the first time he visited this city?"

Keith shook his head, though it seemed Meloia didn't expect an answer. The scene began to play, Zarkon's face contorting with emotion that leaked into his voice.

"A Vkullor attacked my home," he said, flinching when Sa took his hand. "It slaughtered. _Millions._  My home was almost destroyed. And no one can promise me that something like that won't happen again next year. So..." He closed his eyes, shook his head. "Are there other Vkullor out there? No. _How many_  Vkullor are out there, and where are they?"

"Ironically enough, It was Zarkon's Question that eventually led Keturah to Earth," Meloia said.

Akira frowned. "How is that ironic?"

"Because the second time she came here, she came looking for your kind."

"The paladins," Keturah said, once more standing in a temple room with a Sage Keith didn't recognize. "Allura's team." She leveled the Sage with a stare that gave nothing away. If Keith didn't know who she was and what she was capable of, he might have believed her interest benign.

"Knowledge of the future is taboo," the Sage said at once. "The paladins of whom you speak have not yet been chosen."

Keturah flicked one hand dismissively. "I care nothing for those paladins in particular." (A lie, and Keith didn't think that was just bias talking.) "But you know the ones I mean. The ones I met the last time I was here. There was Allura, a Galra kit, and two others. Those two belonged to a species I don't know, and I would like to."

"Humans," the Sage said, blandly.

Keturah's lip twitched. "Humans. What do you know of humankind?"

"And you told her?" Matt asked. "Just like that?"

Meloia smiled. "We gave her information," she said, glancing sidelong at the image as the Sage passed a tower of books to Keturah.

"Hang on," Keith said. "I recognize some of those. I've _read_  them."

"Then you know they contain nothing at all useful to Keturah's schemes," Meloia said. "Trivia. Stories. Half of it fiction we've collected from your world, the rest so mundane Keturah burned more than a few volumes on the spot." The Sage's smile twitched wider. "Let it not be said we are unbiased in the Answers we give. A more generous response to Keturah's Question might have led her to your planet millennia before she was meant to. You and everyone you know might have grown up under Zarkon's rule."

"If you knew what she was after, why didn't you just bar her from Oriande and be done with it?" Akira asked. "You know she learned more just being here than she did talking to you. Who knows what else she picked up on without you realizing it."

With a sigh, Meloia let the images go dark. "A valid point. Some of us argued in favor of banning her for just that reason, but you must understand--we had never closed Oriande's borders to anyone before. Sometimes it pays to be able to shape the destinies of history's villains. No." Gathering her robes, Meloia sat on the edge of an unclaimed chair. "It took something far more drastic to force our hand."

She was silent for a long moment, and Keith held his breath, not wanting to be the one to shatter the moment. The wall where Haggar's history had played out remained dark and smoky.

After a long moment, Meloia continued. "Keturah visited Oriande one final time. This was recent, by the scale of Zarkon's Empire. Five, perhaps six hundred years before your time. She had extended Zarkon's lifespan by an order of magnitude, had more than doubled her own. So when she asked us the secret to unending life, it was immediately suspect. We think perhaps there have been side effects. Her magic must be painful, or otherwise unpleasant, or perhaps it is taking too much energy to continue to renew the spell. Perhaps she really was seeking a better answer.

"We told her about the cycle of time here on Oriande--not an answer she could use, but enough to fulfill our end of the contract. Nevertheless, she flew into a rage, accused us of denying her Answers, and demanded we give her another Question." Meloia folded her hands beneath her chin, her gaze far-off as she watched the dark clouds of dormant illusion swirl. "The Keepers of History had had enough by then, and had come to eject her from the city, but they feared a battle and what it might do to reality if any other pilgrims were to get caught up in it. They granted her request on the condition that she never return here again."

"What did she ask you?" Keith asked, breathless.

Meloia turned to look at him and shook her head. "Not us. The Question she had been granted she demanded be answered by the spirit of the Red Lion."

"What makes you think we would agree to that?" a voice demanded. Keith's eyes snapped back to the swirling black clouds, which slowly resolved themselves into another scene: Keturah--no, _Haggar_  standing on the street outside the temple. Even the white robes of Oriande couldn't conceal the changes her magic had wrought--the discolored grayish skin, for once not shifted into a Galra purple. The burning yellow eyes. The bleeding _glaes._  And a horrible aura of wrongness.

The sun had sunk toward the horizon, painting the city in fiery hues, and the streets were quieter than when Keith had passed through earlier. Haggar ignored the Sage who had spoken, turning instead to walk toward the setting sun.

The Sage and several others chased after her, one reaching out to grab her by the wrist. "You may ask your Question of the Sages. We did not agree to this!"

Haggar dissolved into smoke, not breaking stride. She passed beyond the Sage's grasp and reformed, shadows bleeding out from beneath her white cloak.

The scene skipped ahead--the sun dropping lower in the sky, the Sage continuing his pursuit. Many of the others fell behind as Haggar continued to flicker, jumping ahead here and there. Meloia joined the chase near the city outskirts. By this point, only a handful of the original persuers remained. Meloia barked at one of her companions, flinging an arm back toward the city. The man--a temple attendant, it seemed--nodded and turned around, and Meloia raced ahead.

"Stop!" she roared.

Haggar lifted one hand behind her, not turning, and blasted her chasers off their feet with a bolt of raw Quintessence.

_**Enough.** _

The voice sent chills down Keith's spine.

Red.

Only not.

He saw her as Haggar turned: a creature nearly as tall as Haggar herself, with crimson fur and golden eyes and a tail that lashed behind her as she approached. Keith could see the resemblance to the Lions, but this version of Red was so much _more_ , somehow.

 _ **I am here,**_  Red said, stopping ten feet from Haggar and regarding her with narrowed eyes. _**Ask your Question and be gone.**_

"You have _no_  right--" Meloia began.

Haggar _tsked_. " _You_  have no right to tell the great _kotha_  what they can and cannot do. She came of her own free will. Your job here is done."

Meloia spluttered, but the others who had come with her remained prone, some of them moaning in pain, others utterly still.

Haggar turned back to the Red Lion. "You were mine once, and I will make you mine again. Tell me--what do I need to give you to reforge the bond we once had?"

Keith bristled--at the question, yes, but even more so at Haggar's tone. There was no apology there, no contrition or compromise. She had come to take the Red Lion back, and she would not be taking no for an answer.

Red closed her eyes. _**There is nothing you can give me that I want. You chose your path, and I spurned you. If my sight in your realm matched my sight here, if I had seen what you would become, I**_ **never** _ **would have chosen you.**_

Haggar went still. "You _dare_..."

 _ **I dare,**_  Red said. She opened her eyes, her lip pulling back in a snarl as a growl built in her throat. _**You Asked, and I Answered. The deal is done. Now leave this place.**_

For a long moment, Haggar neither moved nor spoke. Keith wasn't honestly sure she was breathing. She just stared at Red, uncomprehending, and he realized she simply hadn't conceived of a reality where Red rejected her a second time. Thousands of years, and, what? She thought it was just a petty grudge? She thought she was too important to be denied?

When her fury broke, it broke like a bomb's blast. Her diplomatic mask shattered into a scream. Her careful poise snapped as she flung her whole body into a spell that leaped from her fingers like lightning. It struck Red too fast for anyone to stop it, and Red roared in pain as a smoldering design cut itself into her chest, burning like coals and coiling around her throat like a collar.

"You are _mine,_ " Haggar hissed as Meloia raised her hands and screamed, and the skies of Oriande split. "You will _always_  be mine."

A bolt of lightning struck the spot where Haggar had been standing, and she vanished in a burst of light, but her final words hung suspended in a horrified silence.

Nyma choked on a sound--something pained and broken that resonated in Keith's chest. "I've seen that scar before," she said, her voice shaky. "I saw it on Red when the Lions talked to us in the Heart."

Keith was on his feet in an instant, his heart leaping into his throat. "We need to go."

The others turned toward him, the same horror and disbelief in their eyes. They didn't seem to have figured it out yet, though, and they stared at him blankly.

Keith flung his hand out, gesturing toward the door and the city beyond. "This is Oriande," he said. "Time is cyclical here, right? And it's still the middle of the day."

Matt sucked in a sharp breath. "This hasn't happened yet."

He started to stand, and Keith's breathing stuttered--hope and fear and desperation all tangled up inside. He took a step back toward the door, his eyes still locked on the images in the wall. He tried to memorize the scene, to fix the path Haggar had taken in his mind. The stewards of Oriande would try to stop him, he knew. But if he could get there in time, he could save Red before any of this happened.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Keith found himself back in the white void full of wispy clouds.

"No!"

"What the _vrekt?_ "

Keith turned at the sound of Nyma's voice and felt a queasy blend of disappointment and relief. It wasn't just him who'd been taken, then. Nyma, Matt, and Akira were all here, too. That meant that Keith wasn't stuck here alone--but it also meant there was no one left to go try to save Red.

"Shit," Akira muttered. "They're serious about preserving the damn time stream, aren't they?"

_Keturah will do what she has done._

Keith jumped, spinning toward the voice, only to find himself face-to-face with the barely-there figure who had watched him and Akira the last time he was here. He still couldn't make out any features--nothing to say how young or old the being might be, to suggest a gender, or even to say that they were, in fact, Altean, as Keith assumed they must be.

"You don't know that," Matt said. "We could stop her. We could _try!_ "

The figure shifted, a suggestion of shaking their head. _What is written cannot be unwritten. Even here, time moves in only one direction. You must learn to move forward._

"Fuck that," Keith hissed. "I'm not just going to sit by and let Haggar hurt Red like that!"

 _I know,_ the figure said. _And I am sorry._

A wind caught the figure, smearing the lines, thinning the clouds that made it up until it was nothing but another curl of vapor in the emptiness around them.

* * *

Hours had passed by the time Oriande released them. Akira didn't know how long--time was strange in the white-washed nowhere space. It stretched and stretched, and then it ended, and it felt as though it couldn't have been more than half an hour.

Instead, they returned to a dark and quiet temple, and when they raced outside, they found Meloia standing on the steps watching the sun dip toward the horizon. The streets were nearly empty, only a few stragglers trudging down the steps and back toward the distant hill where they would leave to return to their own times.

Nyma opened her mouth to tear into Meloia, her stride lengthening with purpose, but a flash of light lit up the twilight, burning the city white for a fraction of a second, and Akira's heart gave a lurch as it did so.

"We banished Keturah after that," Meloia said, soft and sorrowful. "Her and everyone she touched." Her gaze slipped sideways to Matt and Keith, and she didn't have to say anything for Akira to realize. The test after the tower on Roya Vosar. The journey through the Heart. That wasn't the usual way of things. Of course it wasn't; how could all these people have come to Oriande if it were?

It was a test. A trap for those who bore signs of Keturah's influence--people like Keith and Matt--to prove their intentions.

"I wish we could have prevented it. I wish we could have let you try." She sighed, apparently seeing something in the eyes glaring back at her, and she abandoned her efforts to defend her decision. "Go. Follow the sun to the lake at the edge of the city. You'll find her on the southern shore."

They ran. Meloia's directions were sparse, but Akira felt as though he hardly needed them. Red was close, and she was hurting, hurting so keenly it had settled into Akira's chest like a fiery brand. Expectation snatched his breath away, but he didn't slow. He couldn't. Keith and Matt were already distraught; they would need him there when they saw the damage in person.

It took no time at all to reach the edge of the city, not with the streets as empty as they were. It shouldn't have felt like a ghost town, when thousands upon thousands of iterations of each steward lived here. They must have been going about their days, somewhere out there. Eating dinner, going to clubs, reading a book or meeting up with friends. What did life look like, when you were surrounded by yesterdays and tomorrows on endless repeat?

Once the city fell away, the landscape changed. A broad, crescent-shaped lake stretched out before them, quicksilver surface alight with the hues of sunset. Matt faltered as the street turned rough, a thin buffer between the pristine city and the rocky beach ahead. Matt seemed captivated by the lake, or the way the light sparked off of it, but Keith had no patience to take in the sights. He veered south, and Akira followed close on his heels, his throat growing tight.

The Blue Lion appeared from nowhere to intercept them. Akira jumped as she appeared, and Keith actually fell back, her growl cutting across the silence, a clear warning to back off. Akira blinked, certain his eyes were playing tricks on him. Blue had been behind some obstacle, had somehow blended into the scenery. Maybe the light of the sunset, the glare off the water, had blinded Akira. But there were no trees or bushes or dips in the land large enough to hide a lion--a _kotha_ \--that stood as tall as Keith, and Akira couldn't shake the feeling that Blue really had just materialized out of the twilight, all bristling rage and bared teeth.

No one breathed until Nyma stepped forward, her hand outstretched. At once, Blue's posture changed, her growl becoming a purr that radiated pain and fear.

Breathing out a curse, Nyma closed the distance, catching Blue's face between her hands and looking her in the eye for a moment before throwing her arms around Blue's neck. "I know," she whispered. "But you have to let us see her. We want to help."

_**Do you?** _

Nyma murmured over that response, but Akira had eyes only for Blue, who was staring at him now, her golden gaze too intense to hold for long, and too piercing to look away.

Maybe Nyma's hushed argument swayed Blue, or maybe Blue saw something in Akira, but either way she relented, turning to lead them further along the shore. Green joined the procession at some point, bleeding out of the shadows like a phantom stalking them. Akira wasn't sure if she was watching their backs or watching to be sure they didn't do anything malicious, but the skin on the back of his neck crawled with the pressure of her gaze.

Then, she was there. The Red Lion, crumpled on the ground, with Yellow and Black curled around her. Red's head was down, and the other two lay so close to her that Akira couldn't make anything out at first, only a streak of crimson between a black as dark as deep space and a sunny yellow that had turned to bronze with the setting sun.

Black and Yellow growled, a rumble like thunder on the horizon, but Red lifted her head from between them, and Akira had to grab onto Matt before he collapsed.

Red didn't look good.

No, she looked _awful._  She looked... _thin_ , and not in a physical sense. Like she was burning away before his eyes, turning to smoke at the edges. The wound Keturah had inflicted had already faded to something gray and ashen, like the color had leached out of her. It settled around her throat, seeped into her fur. Even the glow of her eyes had faded to the last coals of a dying fire.

She was dying.

Keith shifted closer to Akira. Akira didn't know if he meant to, or if he was even aware of what he was doing, but he drifted within arm's reach, and Akira reached out for him, pulling him close and squeezing. "It's okay," he said, his voice pitched low for Matt and Keith's sake but his eyes never straying from Red. "I'm going to fix this."

They were too stunned to react; maybe they hadn't even heard him. But Nyma was all tensed and ready for a fight, and her gaze bored holes into the side of his head as he squeezed his paladins one last time, then released them and stepped away.

Red shrank back as Akira approached.

 _ **Do you know what you're doing?**_ she asked. _**I won't trick you into this.**_

Akira smiled, his throat constricting at the plea in her voice. He didn't need to look at the lions guarding her, or at the colorless scar across her chest, to know how weak she was. She was dying, and she knew it. She'd chosen it, to some extent. One version of her had, anyway. She'd rather die than be used to hurt her paladins.

She'd rather die than hurt Akira.

"I know," he said. "But the universe needs you more than it needs me." His smile faltered as, behind him, Keith and Matt gave twin cries of dismay, like they'd only just realized what he meant to do. Nyma held them back, and Akira silently thanked her. She understood. More than that, she would be exactly what they needed when this was all done. Comfort, yes, but mostly conviction.

They would need someone to be strong for them.

Akira met Red's eyes and nodded. "This is my choice," he said. "Just make sure it's worth it."

_**I swear it.** _

Red closed her eyes and lifted her nose to Akira's waiting palm. Where they touched, he felt flames lick his skin. They were hot, almost unbearably so, but the sensation couldn't properly be called pain, and the flames didn't burn his skin.

They did consume him, though. Slowly at first, and then in a rush. As Red's body dissolved in ash and ember, Akira's came alive. He felt the beginnings of a change, and then the flames came crashing down on him, a silent roaring in his ears as he lost himself in the inferno.

* * *

**End Part I**

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up, I'm taking a little break between Part 1 and 2. Next chapter will be up September 2.


	16. A New Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keith, Matt, Akira, and Nyma went to Oriande in hopes of finding a way to save the Red Lion, who had used Akira to shatter her crystal in order to prevent Keturah from manipulating Keith and Matt through the paladin bond. While in Oriande, the team learned more about Keturah's fall--and that the last time she came to Oriande, she mortally wounded Red. The paladins were too late to stop Keturah, and arrived to find Red's kotha spirit dying. To save her, Akira offered himself, taking on the spirit of the Red Lion and then collapsing on the shore of the lake outside the city.

Nyma's eyes burned as the first light of dawn filtered through the curtains. She sat up, back protesting the motion after endless hours hunched over in expectant vigil. It didn't seem possible for the entire night to have passed already, but Keith and Matt had both long since passed out, leaning against each other in their chairs at Akira's bedside. They'd fought their own exhaustion for the better part of the night, determined to keep watch until Akira woke up, but the last twenty-odd hours had been one long nightmare, and Nyma really couldn't blame them for finally crashing. If anything, the sleep would probably do them some good.

Nyma herself sat near the foot of the bed, and she reached out to lay a hand on Akira's ankle, squeezing it through the blanket. Where Keith and Matt were seeping peacefully--if awkwardly enough that they were both going to wake up with sore necks--Akira had been restless all night, his hands grabbing at the sheets, his face contorting in pain. She thought he was dreaming, but they couldn't wake him up, and Meloia had eventually convinced them to let him wake in his own time.

Matt and Keith had been too tired, by that point, to put up much of a fight, so Nyma hadn't even had to tell them she agreed with the Sage on this point. She didn't know what the side-effects of absorbing an ancient lion-spirit were, but she doubted any doctor would recommend interdimensional travel so soon after the event.

So here they were. Holed up in some abandoned house with too many rooms and too many shadows and an oppressive silence hanging over it all like a watchful specter. The silence was all the worse because none of them wanted to break it. Keith kept looking to Matt like he would have the answers, Matt kept spiraling through waves of emotion that brought him to the edge of tears more than once, and Nyma knew she wasn't capable of anything approaching the level of comfort they would have needed to release some of the tension riding in their shoulders.

And now the silence stretched, every breath too loud, every groan of the chairs making Nyma flinch. She was afraid to even stand, certain her footsteps would be so thunderous in the void of sound that they would wake Keith and Matt at once. Not even the open window provided any relief from the hush; just a murmur of wind that seemed to not want to raise its voice.

It felt like a funeral--and Nyma hated herself the moment she had the thought, but it was _true._ If not for Akira's occasional movements, she might have thought he was dead. He hardy seemed to be breathing, and his skin had gone pale, so much so that the shadows under his eyes made it look like he'd been punched.

Strange markings dotted his skin, most concentrated along his cheekbones, but trailing down his neck toward his collar and dusting the backs of his hands. They'd glowed faintly red during the night--their light so low Nyma could never be entirely sure she wasn't imagining it, but where they were concentrated on his face they looked almost like _glaes_ \--but now that it was light out, they'd faded, and she could see that they looked a little like burst blood vessels, small reddish-purple flecks with bleeding edges.

There was a soft knock on the door, but it might as well have been a cannon's blast with as bad as it startled Nyma, and she was glaring hard at the source of the noise by the time Meloia let herself into the room.

"How is he?" she asked in a whisper. She looked diminished from what she'd been yesterday, her Sage's robes abandoned in favor of a simple tunic and loose pants beneath. It made it harder to hate her for the simple crime of being a Sage, but it stripped her of much of her authority, as well.

Nyma leveled her with her nastiest glare. "How do you think?" She swept a hand toward the bed, where Akira lay with pinched brow and slightly parted lips, like he might have cried out in pain if he could find his voice. "I thought you had damage control to deal with, or whatever."

Meloia folded her hands at her waist. "Yes, well... It turns out damage control doesn't take especially long when there are only fifty of you left."

Nyma turned, hooking her arm over the back of her chair. "I'm sorry, what?"

Meloia gave a weak smile as she took a seat at the foot of the bed beside Nyma. "It's a new day in Oriande," she said. "That hasn't happened in... in centuries, I suppose. Millennia, even _._ Long enough that we’ve all but stopped thinking in those terms."

Nyma had turned to track her progress, and she leaned forward now, too confused to be angry. "The time loop...?"

"Is broken," Meloia said. "Oriande has moved past its prime. All of our past iterations were left behind, and so we are back to the fifty or so who founded the city. Plus the four of you and the four remaining _kotha_. The rest of the city, so far as we can tell, is deserted. Some of the others volunteered to go out scouting, just to be sure, but..."

She trailed off, spreading her hands helplessly, and the silence reasserted itself, all-encompassing and impossibly heavy. Nyma's mouth ran dry, and she couldn't help but wonder if that was why everything felt so ominous. They were living in a ghost town now, thousands of empty homes all around. Nyma didn't know how long Oriande had been around, but the size of the city suggested a population in the hundreds of thousands.

And now there were only fifty people left to fill it.

"Shit," Nyma muttered. "How's everyone holding up?"

"Surprisingly well, actually. I think it's the shock."

"So what does that mean?"

Nyma jumped as Matt spoke, his voice thick with too little sleep. Keith stirred, turning his face into Matt's shoulder with a groan, but his ears swiveled toward Nyma and Meloia like he was waiting for an answer.

"Sorry," Meloia said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

Matt scowled. "It's fine. But what does it mean for the time loop to be broken? For you, for us... for Voltron?"

"In the short term, not much," Meloia said. "We'll have to figure out for ourselves what the future will look like, but Oriande is still removed from the universe at large. Time flows differently here. It's linear once more, but it won't move at the same rate as it does beyond our borders. Some of the others went to watch the gates, just in case any pilgrims slip through to this side of the loop, though I don't think anyone really expects them to."

Nyma frowned. "What about the long term? Without Oriande, what happens to Voltron?"

"It's no longer immortal," Meloia said, her eyes sliding askance. "Though I'm not sure it ever was. Oriande was built to bend time around the kotha--where all the rest of us aged as normal, reliving the same day until we filled a city with our iterations, the kotha never did. There were only ever the five of them, aware of the passage of time and to some extent conscious beyond the bounds of a single day, but not aging. Not progressing through the cycles. From their perspective, only a single day has passed since Oriande was built--albeit one that must seem endless for all they have learned, seen, and done.

“Now, I suppose they will be allowed to age again, though it will happen more quickly from our perspective than from yours. Eventually the kotha will grow old--a hundred years from now, a thousand. There’s no way to be sure until we determine how close to the outside universe we have drifted. But it will happen, and the Lions of Voltron will begin to weaken and fade. Eventually, they will cease to be what you know them to be, and will revert to mundane metal and mortal-made weapons."

"So we killed Voltron, is what you're saying." Keith lifted his head, his eyes sticking on Akira for a long moment before swinging to Meloia. He looked even more exhausted than he had when he'd gone to sleep, but it was a defeated sort of exhaustion, not the desperation that had kept him up long into the night.

Meloia pursed her lips. " _Voltron_ was already dead. Without the Red Lion..."

On the bed beside them, Akira continued to sleep. He'd been running a fever last night, and Nyma wasn't optimistic enough to think it had broken--especially when Matt reached out to brush the sweaty hair from Akira's forehead and frowned as Akira tilted his head into the touch.

"What's done is done," Meloia said. "Keturah tried to kill Red, and Akira may have saved her. I won't tell you there will be no ramifications from his actions, but you can deal with those as they come. What matters is the universe doesn't have to survive this war without Voltron."

"Does the universe survive?" Matt asked. "I mean... you've seen the future, right? Oriande exists outside time and all that. Do you know how this war ends?"

Meloia hesitated. "If you'd asked me that yesterday, I would have said that I did. But your future--everything that comes after your return from this pilgrimage--it has always had a different quality to the other futures we have seen. Not less clear, but... perhaps less certain. Now that Oriande is... different..." She shook her head. "I no longer know how far we can trust our sight. We have seen the future far beyond your time, yes. But perhaps that future is malleable. I suppose we will find out together."

Someone else knocked on the door, and an Altean Nyma had never seen before poked her head into the room. "Sorry to interrupt, but Jecs found a few stragglers down by the temple. They're going to want to talk to you."

Meloia sighed, bracing her hands on her knees as she stood. "I should go. Take as much time as you need. We'll send you back to the Castle of Lions once you're all ready to travel."

Matt was the only one of them who attempted a farewell, and even his was lackluster. Nyma had turned her attention back to Akira. She had no idea when he would be ready to travel, but she supposed it was a relief to hear that they would be _able_ to. It was a fear she hadn't had time to recognize--that with everything else in Oriande gone to shit, travel between here and the outside would be similarly screwed.

"How much longer do you think he'll be out?" Keith asked, his voice low like he wasn't sure he wanted the others to hear his question. Matt crumpled in response, crossing his arms on the edge of Akira's mattress and dropping his face into them. Keith cringed, and Nyma put a hand on his shoulder as she stood. The awkward silence stretched for a moment until Nyma gave up on finding a satisfactory answer to Keith’s question.

"I'm going to go see what kind of breakfast is available in a deserted city outside of time. I'll be back soon."

She felt only a little guilty as she fled. It was easier to breathe in the hallway just outside the spacious bedroom they'd been offered for the night. There were other rooms down the hall, as Meloia had pointed out, but none of them wanted to leave Akira alone after what he'd done.

Now Nyma almost wished she’d taken Meloia up on that offer.

Nyma wasn't good at comfort. She knew that about herself, and she wasn’t surprised that she’d taken the first chance to get out of that room. But there were other things she _was_ good at, and bossing people around was one of them. As long as she was running away from her emotional responsibilities, she could at least try to get Keith and Matt to take care of themselves--and if the moment of peace helped her steady her own heart, all the better.

She had a feeling they were going to need her as steady as possible.

* * *

Karen wasn't on the emergency call list. Only the paladins, a few top officers of the guard, and Coran were. Karen didn’t mind; most of the time she couldn’t do anything to help in an emergency anyway, and they had to be careful not to incite a panic among the rest of the castle's inhabitants. The fewer people who got the call, the less chance there was for civilians to overhear and start talking.

Nevertheless, Karen woke without prompting early on the third morning after Matt and the others had left for Oriande, instantly alert and already dressed before she sussed out what it was that had woken her.

Danger.

Not yet immediate, but rushing closer.

Pidge and Val were about to head out on a mission, and it was one that even had the Green Lion on edge.

The door hissed open, the bright lights of the hallway assaulting her eyes, and she stopped in her tracks as it hit her.

The Vkullor.

The insight didn't go much further than that--Karen didn't _let_ it go much further than that--but it was impetus enough. Coran had reconfigured the castle during the last round of repairs so there was an elevator direct from the residential floor where the paladins and their families slept to the bridge. Less than two minutes after waking up, Karen was stepping out of the elevator onto the bridge, where half the team was already gathered.

Half the team, plus Coran, Layeni, and--

"Keena," Karen said, forcing a smile. "How nice of you to join us."

Keena's answering smile was nearly as strained as Karen's, and Coran shifted like he wanted to get in between the two of them. Fortunately for him, he thought better of it and remained where he was at the front of the group with Shiro and Allura.

"Karen." Keena crossed her arms on the back of the empty red paladin's chair and cocked her head to the side. "I didn't think we'd invited you."

"Green sent me," Karen said shortly. "I think that's invitation enough, don't you?"

The elevator returned just then, carrying Lance and Meri--the last two they were waiting on, it seemed, as Shiro stepped forward at that moment to start the briefing. And to forestall any additional sniping between Karen and Keena, no doubt.

"We've just received word through one of Keena's agents," he said. "Zarkon's Vkullor is on the move again. The agent was able to provide us with coordinates of the target, but unfortunately they were unable to get the message off before the Vkullor launched."

"Where's it headed?" Pidge asked. Like the rest of the paladins, they were already in their armor, and their fingers drummed on the helmet they held pinned against their hip. "Have we sent a warning ahead? I'm sure they can't hold out against a Vkullor for long, but--"

Allura cut them off by igniting the star map, which spread across the bridge in a swirl of holographic lights. "Its target appears to be one of the Balmera under Zarkon's control. We've found a few references to it in the notes Pidge, Hunk, and Shay compiled; it seems to have been falling behind Imperial production standards." She glanced to Shiro, her composure wavering. "We think he may be making a statement at the same time as he's... cutting dead weight, as he sees it."

"Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of details on the situation," Shiro said. "Coran will open a wormhole to the edge of the system. Be on your guard, and be ready to improvise. Our first priority is to get the Vkullor away from the Balmera. If there are any Imperial ships in the area, the Guard will take care of them. We'll talk strategy once we know what we're dealing with. Any questions?"

There were none, and the paladins quickly dispersed to their respective lions. Coran took his place at the control pedestals, and Karen joined Layeni--if only to give herself a buffer against Keena, who showed no signs of leaving now that she'd delivered her information. Coran didn't ask her to go, either--though that may have been because he was focused on opening a wormhole. Karen tried to make herself focus, too, but it was impossible with that woman standing ten feet away, her gaze making the back of Karen's neck crawl.

As soon as they passed through the wormhole, of course, she didn't have to worry about hyperfixating on Keena any longer.

There was no Vkullor here. Karen needed only a brief glimpse of the system to know that. She didn't think there was any living thing left, except for the Lions and the passengers of the castle itself.

If Allura hadn't said the target was a Balmera, Karen wouldn't have even known that that was what she was looking at. It was an asteroid field. Broken stone and dull crystals as far as the eye could see, crashing together and spinning off into open space. One slammed against the castle's shields and crumbled to dust, and Karen nearly gagged as she realized that it had been part of a living creature mere moments ago.

"No." Shay's voice trembled, her horror echoing in the stunned silence that filled the bridge.

"We're too late," Hunk whispered.

Karen screwed her eyes shut, hating that she'd let this blindside her. Zarkon didn't want a fight. He wasn't trying to lure the paladins to their doom.

It was just like Allura had said. He was getting rid of dead weight, and sending a message to the universe in the same breath.

If he wanted you dead, not even Voltron itself could save you.

* * *

Nyma returned, eventually, with a platter of bread and fruit and something that looked almost like yogurt, except that it was an off-putting brownish yellow color that turned Matt's stomach

"City's empty," she said, setting the platter on the nightstand and giving Matt and Keith a pointed look as she grabbed a hunk of bread for herself and dropped back into her chair. "That means there's a fuck-ton of food out there, and half of it is going to spoil before anyone can possibly eat it, so if you want more, all you have to do is say the word." She waved a hand vaguely and tore off a corner of the bread with her teeth. She chewed, her eyes still fixed on Matt and Keith, neither of whom moved. Her eyes darted for the platter, and Matt sighed.

None of the food looked appetizing, but he grabbed two slices of bread anyway and passed one to Keith, who made a face and pinched off a tiny portion to stick in his mouth.

Nyma rolled her eyes. "I cornered one of the locals while I was downstairs," she said. "He wouldn't give me a solid number, but he swore up and down that time's even more compressed than usual here in Oriande because of all the magical bullshit that's been happening."

"What do you mean, 'more compressed?'" Keith asked, still just picking at his bread.

Nyma dusted the crumbs from her lap and shrugged. "Last time Matt was here, an hour or so in the Heart and half a day in Oriande translated to, what did we figure? Three weeks or so? I won't bore you with all the technical garbage explanations, but we've probably only been gone a day or two so far, and right now we're not really adding to that time."

Some corner of Matt's mind was intrigued by that--that the relative flow of time could vary even when you were going to the exact same point in Oriande's history. He wanted to ask how that worked--did time _outside_ Oriande flow differently from one year to the next? Did it matter that they'd spent half the day in spoiler jail because no one wanted to risk saving Red's life?

His gaze drifted back to Akira, and he set the last crust of his bread aside, appetite and curiosity gone. _Wake up,_ he thought. He wasn't sure who he was talking to--Akira, or Red, or the latent magic of Oriande, or whatever god might preside over this dark corner of space.

He just wanted Akira to wake up, crack a joke. He'd pretend he was okay, even if he wasn't, but he would smile, and he would tell Matt it was going to be okay, and Matt would believe him because something about Akira was too sure to doubt.

But Akira didn't wake up.

His fever didn't break. His brow still furrowed from time to time; his hands clutched at the blanket covering him. But he didn't open his eyes, and he didn't respond to Matt calling his name or Nyma squeezing his wrist.

Keith was the first to excuse himself, going in search of a shower. Nyma went with him, and maybe she really did just want a shower of her own, as she claimed, but Matt thought she might be worried about Keith.

He thought she might be right to worry.

How long did they wait? If Akira didn't wake up soon, did they risk waiting here another day? A week? At what point did they admit that something was wrong with him, really _wrong_? When did they risk crossing the border between Oriande and the outside universe so they could get Akira the medical help he needed?

Might need. _Didn't_ need, because he was fine. He was just tired. Taking on the spirit of the Red Lion would do that to you-- But what did that _mean_? Maybe Matt should be more worried than he was. Maybe waiting was a mistake. Just because the fever wasn't high enough to be dangerous and Akira didn't look like he was in any real distress didn't mean something wasn't wrong. Maybe they should have taken him home the second he'd collapsed. What if he was _dying_ \--?

Matt stood abruptly, digging his thumbs into the corners of his eyes and breathing through the beginnings of a panic attack. He'd had enough of those by now to recognize the signs, but he was hardly any better at stopping them now than he'd been the first time one hit. Maybe if Shiro was here to talk him through it. Maybe if he had Akira to wrap him in a hug and squeeze the panic out of him--but he didn't have Akira, and that was the entire problem.

The smell of the brown yogurt was starting to get to him, and even though he knew it was all in his head, because the yogurt didn't smell like _anything_ \--it didn't matter. If it stayed in the room he was going to be sick, so he grabbed the tray full of food, gathered up the half-eaten pieces of bread Nyma and Keith had left on the night stand and the dresser, grabbed the empty cups of water Meloia had brought them late last night, and he carried it out into the hallway, where he found a narrow table on which to set it down. The stairs were hardly five feet further along, and the kitchen door was just across from the base of the staircase, but fear had tethered Matt to Akira's bedside. Even just being out here had his chest tight and his skin crawling.

He dropped the tray on the table and scurried back into the room, telling himself that the people of Oriande hadn't done anything to help him, so they could damn well deal with a little extra clean up. Wasn't like he owed them anything--

Akira was sitting up when Matt reentered the room.

Matt stopped in the doorway for a long moment. He forgot how to breathe, and it wasn't until his legs started to shake that he forced himself to move, stumbling across the room before he collapsed on the spot. He caught himself on the side of the bed, his mouth hanging open but words refusing to come as he studied Akira. He was still pale, probably lightheaded considering the way he was cradling his head in his hands. The scattered red marks like countless tiny spiderwebs beneath his skin were still there, but they weren't glowing now. They looked more like bruises than anything, like Akira had been stung by a thousand hornets, and though Matt cringed to look at them, he didn't let them stop him from reaching out and placing a hand on Akira's shoulder.

Akira jumped, raising his head to stare at Matt, wide-eyed.

The comfort Matt had been about to offer dried up in that moment. If the marks on Akira's skin had faded, the changes in his eyes were more pronounced than ever. His irises, normally a steely gray, were now a burnished gold that blazed like a furnace, and a reddish spark burned deep within his pupils, flashing now and again when the light caught his eye just so, like a cat's eyes flashing in the dark.

Suddenly Matt remembered something Red had once said, after she'd taken over Akira's actions during the battle on New Altea. She'd said it was a dangerous thing, to enter him like that. _A human mind is not meant to hold all of me,_ she'd said. _It could burn away everything that makes him him._

"Akira?" Matt asked, his voice small and his hand, on Akira's shoulder, shaking. "Are you okay?"

Akira blinked, his brow slightly furrowed. After a moment, recognition lit his face, but it quickly turned to sorrow, and he lifted his own hand to squeeze the one Matt had rested on his shoulder.

"Akira?"

Akira smiled, sad, and said simply, "No."

* * *

"We need to figure this out."

Hunk looked up, startled, as Pidge bustled into his workroom. He'd come here looking for something to occupy his mind--and to drive out images of the shattered Balmera. He'd seen too much destruction lately, too much death. It reminded him of the remains of the free Balmera he and Shay had found while searching for the Migration. It reminded him of Metos and her people, who were still healing from the last Vkullor attack.

"Sorry, what?" he asked, still staring dumbly as Pidge dropped into the seat beside him, scooting several half-finished gadgets aside to make room for their computer on the work bench.

"The Vkullor," they said, studiously avoiding his eyes.

They'd _all_ been hit hard by the sight of the shattered Balmera, every last one of them horrified and hushed on the comms as they combed the debris together with the Guard for survivors. (They'd found none, and recovered fewer than a dozen corpses, which Coran had arranged to be transported to the Migration for a memorial service.)

They'd all been hit hard, but none harder than Shay, who had scoured the battlefield with an all-consuming desperation, growing more distraught every minute as they failed to find any signs of life. She'd broken down by the end of it, screaming into Hunk's shoulder while he double checked that both their mics were muted. Shay deserved privacy while she mourned another slaughter, another tragedy for her people, who had already suffered too much.

She was resting now, having retreated to her room as soon as they returned to the castle. She'd asked for some time alone, and Hunk had obliged--but trying to get his own mind off the broken sounds she'd made and the sharp-edged agony swirling in her song was an exercise in futility.

"What is there to figure out?" he asked, poking at the gravity module he was working on and trying not to sound as bitter as he felt. "It's a world-killing monster that nothing in the universe can stop. Ta-da. I figured it out for you."

Pidge was silent for a long time, and Hunk imagined they were fighting against their gut instinct to bite back with sarcasm and snark. Eventually, they gave up on saying anything and instead simply opened their laptop, swiping at the touchpad to wake it up. "None of us likes not knowing what to do, and I know we have like a bazillion other things to worry about--Shiro and Allura most of all--but we can't just not deal with this."

Hunk bristled. "Well, if you have any ideas on how to kill it, I'm all ears."

"Great." Pidge opened a document from their desktop, then turned and grinned at Hunk. "That's exactly what I was going to suggest."

Against his better judgment, Hunk leaned over for a better look. Pidge gave him a disgruntled glance, but didn't protest.

"We don't know how to kill this thing, right?" they said. "The problem is, we've all just been fixating on that, which means we aren't even really _trying_ to come up with a plan. What we need are ideas--plausible, crazy, feasible or totally out there, I don't care. We need things we can try so the next time we get a call like this, we're not all panicking."

Hunk skimmed the short list Pidge had brought up. "Wormhole decapitation? Pidge--"

They held up their hands. "I'm well aware that half of these stand no chance of working and the rest are too risky to try 'just because.' That's not the point. If we try something and it doesn't work, we get more data to use to build the next hypothesis." They hesitated, reaching up to tug at the hair that had grown out enough to brush against the collar of their shirt. "And we can, like, rank the desperate ideas on a scale of 'emergency' to 'last fucking resort.'" They turned to give him a lopsided grimace and lifted their shoulder in a shrug. "Sooner or later, we're _going_ to get desperate. At least if we talk about it ahead of time, we'll be taking a calculated risk and not just throwing darts at the metaphorical wall."

Hunk was not impressed. "You realize that if we deliberately compromise a wormhole by sending a Vkullor through it, we could end up raining chunks of Vkullor the size of a small moon on a dozen different inhabited planets?"

"And if the alternative is Daibazaal Two-Point-Oh on Earth, or Metos getting destroyed like the Balmera we couldn't save today?" Pidge's chin jutted out in defiance, but they relented a moment later--maybe because Hunk felt like he'd just been skewered and it probably showed on his face. "There's not going to be an easy answer here. I know that. But we aren't helping anyone by turning a blind eye."

Hunk crossed his arms on the work bench and flicked at a loose screw near his elbow. "Isn't this the sort of thing we should take to Shiro and Allura?"

"We will," Pidge said. "But they're both dealing with the Coalition right now. A lot of people are scared Zarkon's gonna send the Vkullor after them next. Two or three worlds have already pulled out of the Coalition. A lot more are threatening to do the same."

"What? Seriously?"

Pidge nodded. "I overheard some, uh, _heated negotiations_ when I went to the bridge to see Shiro and Allura. I figured it was better not to interrupt. But if we can put something together and go to them with a list of options?"

It would help. And not just Shiro and Allura; the Coalition worlds would all feel better if they saw that Voltron had concrete plans in place to deal with the Vkullor. The sooner Voltron could deliver, the better.

"Fine," Hunk said. "What have you got so far?"

"Mostly things that have come up before," Pidge said. "Using a wormhole to tear it apart, amassing an army on par with the one that took down the last Vkullor ten thousand years ago..."

"Cloaking tech?" Hunk asked. "What's that mean?"

Pidge leaned back in their chair. "You remember how Dark Red freaked out over Green and Red being cloaked? I wanna see if that holds true for the real Vkullor. Won't kill it, but we might be able to use it to lead the Vkullor where we want it--or to distract it, in a pinch."

"Just as long as I'm not the one who has to be the bait."

Pidge rolled their eyes. "Okay, _Red_ wasn't even fast enough to outfly the Vkullor. We're _definitely_ not going to ask Yellow to do it."

They meant it as a joke, but Hunk's stomach dropped at the mention of Red. He knew it was too soon to be worrying about the team that had gone to Oriande, but... he was worried. Red was holding on--barely--and now that he was thinking about it, Hunk wanted to go down there and check on her, just to be sure nothing had changed in the last eight hours.

He resisted, and forced himself to focus on Pidge's list. His leg bounced under the table. "Okay. Um... Do we have anything on Vkullor biology? Research, or old text books or anything? Maybe we can find something that's toxic to Vkullors, or maybe a parasite. Like the Niskaia."

"You think the Niskaia could infect a Vkullor?"

"Well, not the Niskaia specifically," Hunk said. "But something like that. Something that will slow it down, weaken it enough that we stand a chance. I know it's a long-shot."

Pidge tipped their head to the side. "Not any worse than finding an army big enough to take it on at full strength," they said, adding _poison/parasite_ to their list. "I'll ask Coran if there's anything in the archives we could check. And maybe look for recordings of the last Vkullor fight, while we're at it. Maybe we can identify natural weak spots in Vkullor anatomy or something."

"What, like attacking it from the inside? Does that actually work in real life?"

"I doubt it, and don't you dare bring it up around Matt or Keith. They'd probably take it as a challenge."

Hunk grinned despite himself.

"Anyway, no," Pidge said. "I'm thinking more like... I don't know. Like how people say if a shark attacks you, you should punch it in the gills. Sensitive spots, or at the _very_ least figuring out where vital organs are. It's going to be damn near impossible to break this thing's skin, so the least we can do is try to make sure if and when we manage it, it counts."

"I guess that's a good idea, yeah." Hunk scratched his cheek, trying to make himself think. "Okay, what else, what else? Build stronger weapons? Or— _different_ weapons? Maybe it's strong against lasers, but like... missiles would do better. Or acid or something. Maybe we can't shoot through its skin, but we could drill through it."

Pidge grinned as they added it to the list. "I'm trying real hard not to make a Pokemon joke right now, I'll have you know."

"Know your type advantages?" Hunk guessed.

Pidge fired off a distracted finger-gun at him, then got back to typing, adding _different/stronger weapons_ and _drill through the skin_ to the list. They paused, then added _magic?_ "As long as we're tossing out ideas, right? Haggar can drain things of Quintessence. Matt said that Allura could basically do the same thing if she tried. She manipulates the flow of Quintessence, after all. I'm not saying that we _want_ to make Meri or Allura use the sort of magic Haggar does, but..."

"But we are dealing with a Vkullor," Hunk said. "If it's the only choice we have..."

"And hey. Maybe if we form Voltron first, we'll all be doing it together. Share the guilt sort of thing."

Hunk very much doubted Meri _or_ Allura would see it like that, and he wasn't going to be the one to bring it up, but... They were trying to list every possible option. If they weren't leaving off rupturing a wormhole just because it was insanely risky, they couldn't leave off the morally questionable options, either.

"I don't suppose there's any way we could turn the Vkullor back on the Empire."

Pidge lifted their head, seemingly intrigued by the idea. "Haggar probably does have some way to stop it if it gets to that point," they mused. "If we can force her to kill it--or figure out what she has and where she keeps it so _we_ can use it--that might honestly be the easiest solution."

It could be the bloodiest, too. Hunk wasn't in love with the idea of siccing a Vkullor on any concentrated pocket of sapient life, enemy or no. On the bright side, he doubted it would be Shiro or Allura's first choice, either. So he kept his mouth shut as Pidge wrote it down and scrounged for more palatable alternatives.

The hiss of the door interrupted them, and Hunk turned as Val poked her head in, breathless and a little frazzled.

"Pidge!" she said. "Good. You _are_ here."

Pidge turned, frowning. "What's wrong?"

Val only shook her head. "They're back."

* * *

Shiro couldn't get down to the Blue Lion's hangar fast enough, and not just because it meant getting a moment to breathe without the entire Coalition falling apart in front of him. Less than three full days had passed since Matt, Keith, and Akira left, but Shiro had felt their absence every second. Lance must have noticed, too, because he'd glued himself to Shiro's side and refused to leave.

...Shiro would admit, he'd been more of a help in dealing with panicky world leaders for the last two hours than Shiro had been. Shiro was just wound too tight to deal with people who got scared and bailed instead of realizing that the best chance any of them had was to stand together.

Well, he had time to breathe now, and he would take full advantage of that for as long as it lasted. Lance would probably get Akira to double-team him on the relaxation front, and even if Shiro honestly couldn't step away from this particular crisis, the two of them combined were sure to keep on until they'd at least gotten a laugh out of him.

(All this assuming, of course, that they'd found what they were after. Otherwise, Red was dead, and Shiro was headed for a very somber reunion.)

No one had yet emerged from the Blue Lion by the time Shiro arrived with Lance and Allura.

"You're sure they landed here?" Shiro asked.

Lance arched an eyebrow. "Dude. You didn't hear Blue freaking out inside my head. They're here."

Shiro didn't doubt him, not really. There was no faking the way he'd gone suddenly distant during a call with the leaders of Yvelta. Shiro had been afraid it was bad news, but Lance had held it together long enough to politely wrap up the call, and as soon as it disconnected, Lance had taken Shiro and Allura by the wrist and dragged them toward the door, calling over his shoulder to Coran, "Blue's hangar. Now."

Karen was already here, along with Meri, and Val arrived with Pidge and Hunk not long after.

Shiro glanced at Karen, hoping she might have some idea what was going on--through Green or just by virtue of having been here before Shiro. She only shook her head, though, and Shiro drummed his fingers on his thigh. He debated crossing the hangar to knock on Blue's jaw--or else getting Lance to do it.

Before he could decide how much he wanted to risk pissing off one of the lions, Blue herself shifted, lowering her head. Keith and Matt emerged together, Nyma just visible at the top of the ramp. Hovering.

Shiro started forward, but the motion drew Keith's gaze, and he stared, wide-eyed, raw in a way that made Shiro falter.

"What happened?" Shiro asked, stumbling over his next step as his body tried to retreat and close the distance at the same time. "It didn't work?"

Keith's ears went back, and he went on staring at Shiro, petrified. Matt shuddered, dropping his gaze. Something inside the Blue Lion caught his attention, and he glanced behind himself briefly before surging forward and catching Shiro's arms.

"Shiro, I--" His voice broke, and he bit his lip hard, his face scrunching up. "We had no idea--Akira--"

Shiro only meant to steady Matt, but at the mention of his brother, his grip tightened, and Matt winced. "What about Akira?" Shiro asked, his voice barely making it to a whisper. His mind scrambled ahead of him, trying to make sense of Matt's stuttering explanation, Keith's guilty posture, Nyma's distance. What could possibly have happened in the last three days? It was _Oriande_. Frustrating--infuriating, even--and emotionally taxing, but not _dangerous._ It was the one place in the universe the war couldn't reach.

That's what they'd thought, anyway.

Footsteps on the ramp, heavy and hollow, pulled Shiro's eyes away from Matt, and he nearly collapsed at the sight of Akira--a little unsteady on his feet, sure, and paler than was healthy, but perfectly intact and walking under his own power.

Shiro breathed out a laugh. "Jesus, Matt. Don't scare me like that. I thought someone _died._ " Matt made an aborted noise, clinging on for a moment as Shiro pulled away to greet Akira. "Let me guess. This joke was _your_ brilliant idea?"

Akira stared at him, golden eyes catching the light, and slowly tipped his head to the side. He stared at Shiro like they'd never met, and Shiro slowed to a stop just out of arm's reach.

Suddenly, Akira's eyes lit up, his mouth rounding in an 'O' of understanding. " _That's_ right! You're brothers." He grinned apologetically, just like he always did when he'd done something stupid and irresponsible he didn't really regret, but which he knew Shiro would be upset about. "Sorry, still trying to sort through everything. You know, I've mostly only seen you through Black, and you know how she gets. Blue's good with images, and Yellow's good with voices, but Black's too..." He waved his hands--a little to big, a little too loose. "Conceptual?"

"Who are you?"

Shiro's voice came out harder than he meant it too, cold and flat in a way he'd never been with Akira. And the hurt that flashed across his face looked _so much_ like Akira, just as all of it did. Whoever this was did a nearly flawless impersonation of Shiro's brother--the right smile, the right mannerisms, but it was just the slightest bit off, like an actor who knew every line but didn't have the right inflection.

Akira reached out for him, that hurt look coming again as Shiro stepped back. It cut Shiro to the core. "Takashi..."

Shiro turned to Matt, who wouldn't meet his eyes; to Keith, who only stared; to Nyma, who had finally ventured down the ramp, her expression carefully neutral.

"What happened?" Shiro demanded. He was keenly aware of his team gathered around him, frozen as the scene played out. None of them wanted to interrupt; none of them said a word.

Nyma pressed her lips together. "Akira found a way to save Red." She gestured to Akira, like that was an answer, like it should have been obvious, like--

Shiro turned back to Akira and found those ageless golden eyes staring back at him. He fell back, horrified, shaking his head. "No."

"Shiro," Matt said, his voice breaking. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize what he was planning. If I had--"

Akira's brow furrowed, sympathy painted on too-thick in every crease of his face. "I promise, this _was_ the only way."

Matt rounded on him, sharp as a cracking whip, his guilt flashing over to rage in a millisecond. "That's easy for you to say. You didn't have to sacrifice anything."

 _Sacrifice._ The word stuck in Shiro's chest like a knife's blade, cold and hard and freezing his breath in his lungs. He stared at the side of Akira's face, searching for something familiar, something honest.

All he found was more and more proof that it was a stranger who wore his brother's skin.

Akira blinked, and after a moment, he moved away from Shiro, heading for Matt as though to offer comfort. "Matt. I know this is sudden--"

Matt jerked back, snatching his arm away before Akira could touch him. "Sudden?" he hissed. "You think this would be better if you'd taken it slower?" He held up his hands as Akira tried to say something. "Don't. We’re going to your hangar, and you’re going to fix this."

"Matt… I can’t--"

“You can, and you will.” Matt brushed past him, storming toward the door. “Move.”

* * *

It was a silent procession down to Red's hangar. No one seemed to be sure whether or not they should follow Red--it had to be Red, didn't it? It definitely wasn't Akira watching them all with those calculating eyes. Well. Nyma didn't seem to have any reservations, and Lance only had to look at Allura to know she wasn't about to walk away. He didn't blame her. It was anyone's guess whether Matt or Shiro was more likely to snap, and Lance didn't want to consider what it might look like when they did.

He nodded to Allura, glanced at Keith, who was prickly in a way Lance knew better than to try to smooth out just now. Then he fell into step beside Nyma, just behind Shiro, Allura, and Keith in the procession.

"What happened?" he asked Nyma in a whisper, hoping Keith was far enough away--or too engrossed in his own thoughts--to hear.

Nyma made a face. "Akira absorbed the spirit of the Red Lion, and I'm pretty sure it broke Oriande."

That... was not a sufficient explanation, but Nyma was glaring at him as though _daring_ him to keep on with that line of conversation. He dropped it, of course. One of Keith's ears was cocked back, which suggested that Lance's question hadn't gone quite so unnoticed as he'd hoped. That, plus the rigid set of Shiro's shoulders, was enough to put the brakes on any sort of conversation.

Matt and Red were waiting when the rest of them reached the hangar--Matt conspicuously distant from Red, who stared at him, bewildered. Red turned as the elevator doors opened, and straightened, flashing a smile that didn't quite reach Akira's usual levels of stubborn cheer before heading toward the Red Lion itself, which remained as still and dark as it had for the last few days.

Keith and Shiro hurried after Red, while Nyma split off from Lance to wrap her hand around the back of Matt's neck, playfully but unapologetically steering him toward the ladder that led up to the open hatch on the lion's side. Lance, together with Allura, hurried after Keith and Shiro. He just couldn't be comfortable leaving the two of them alone with Red right now.

Inside the cramped maintenance space, it was dark, the only light the Balmera crystal lying up against the pedestal that held the bottled remains of Red's old crystal. Someone switched on a work light clamped to the catwalk railing, and Lance squinted in the sudden harsh light.

Red had made a beeline for the two crystals, smiling at the new crystal on the floor and trailing a hand along the connected conduit like it was amusing, somehow. Keith crossed his arms over his chest, his face utterly blank as he watched. Red lingered only a moment on the new crystal, then reached out for the jar that held the fragments of the old and unscrewed the cap. Lance didn't know what it was Coran had suspended the fragments in--something denser than water, but still liquid, which cascaded down into the shadowed depths of the maintenance space as Red upended the contents over one outstretched palm.

The fragments blazed with new light as they touched skin, and Red set the empty jar back on the empty pedestal to clasp the fragments in both hands. Keith made a soft, curious noise, but Red only breathed, eyes closed, apparently unaware of the rest of them and whatever questions they may have had. Tiny red markings--pinpricks of light like an entire universe painted in freckles--lit up across Red's skin, blazing with a light as warm and alive as the crystals' glow.

A moment later, both the markings and the crystal fragments in Red's hands went dark.

Lance's heart clenched, but Red didn't look upset at the way things were going, more... captivated by the now-dark crystal fragments. Shiro shifted closer, and Red startled, snatching up the jar and dumping the fragments back in before turning to pass it to Coran.

"You can mount the new crystal now. This one is done for."

Coran took the jar, seemingly thrown by Red's cavalier attitude. _Everyone_ was thrown, actually--Lance included. "Just like that?" he asked.

Red gave him a strange look. "You want this to be harder?"

"No, I mean..." Lance held up his hands. "You can't just replace the crystal. Can you? I thought that was the whole point of going to Oriande."

Red waved a hand. "The only reason we needed those specific crystals in the first place was because we'd left our spirits in Oriande. I'm not there anymore, so..." A shrug. "Any old power source will do."

"So, what?" Matt said. "You're just going to stay in Akira forever?"

Red’s face softened. "I tried to tell you... There’s no fixing this--this _is_ the fix. Unless you know something I don’t?"

"Can't you like... inhabit the lion?" Lance asked, gesturing to the metal around them. "Like you did before?"

Red frowned at him, seemingly confused by his question. "Sometimes I forget you don't know how this all works."

"Then by all means," Matt said, flinging an arm out. "Enlighten us."

"The lions are machines," Red said. "Nothing more, nothing less. On their own, they cannot house a consciousness, much less sustain an independent existence. The spirits that live in Oriande-- _lived_ , in my case--are the beings behind it all. Until now, you've only ever interacted with echoes of our real selves. Splinters of our minds that reside on this plane. They give the illusion of being independent beings, but only because the connection between us is so weak. The 'lions,' inasmuch as they exist, are dependent on our real selves, and on the crystals made when we were all born, which maintain the link between Oriande and the rest of the universe."

"Okay," Pidge said slowly. "So....?"

"So, we've got two problems now." Red hopped up onto the railing, balancing precariously with one leg hooked over the top rung. "One, the me that was in Oriande with my sisters isn't there anymore. I would have died except that Akira took me in. That means the link is broken. I'll still be able to keep the lion body functional, but I'll need to stay close. It won't be autonomous like it was before. Problem number two." Red flashed two fingers. "I don't have my own body anymore. I can't 'inhabit the lion like I did before,' because I never _inhabited_ the lion at all. This body is the only body that can host me, because Akira is my adjunct. He held a piece of my soul."

" _Held_?" Matt asked, his voice deathly quiet. "Are you telling me Akira is _dead_?"

Red blinked, frowned. "Of course not. He's just... part of me now."

That was the wrong thing to say. Shiro had gone blank--not angry, not hurt, just. Blank. Like he'd had too much and had decided to just nope out of the rest of this conversation. Matt, in contrast, looked about ready to explode.

"Get out."

Red reeled back. "What?"

Matt stepped forward, planting a hand on Red’s chest and shoving. Red nearly toppled off the railing, but Matt hardly seemed to care. "I said get out of him."

"I... I can't. Matt--"

Matt jerked back as Red reached out for him. "At least let Akira speak for himself, since you say he's not dead."

"He's _not_ ," Red insisted.

"Then let me talk to him."

"I can't."

" _Why?_ "

"Because." Red faltered, crumpling in the first sign of uncertainty Lance had yet seen. "The lines between us are thin, and rapidly fading. Our memories, our emotions... They’re all mixed up together, and there’s no teasing them apart anymore. You can’t talk to him because _he_ is _me._ "

Matt's face darkened. "Bullshit. You took Akira away from us."

"He offered--"

"He's an idiot," Matt said. "And no one else agreed to this. You _get_ that this is the sort of thing Keturah does, right? Stealing people's bodies. Taking away their autonomy. She did it to Shiro. She's doing it to _my dad_ right now. And now you went and did the same thing to Akira."

Red went still--the same sort of surreal stillness that had come over Shiro, like they'd both been turned to stone, their minds a million miles away.

"Hold on," Hunk said, incredibly brave or incredibly stupid--Lance wasn't sure which. He stepped forward, his hands up. "We're all upset, and we're all going to look for a way to bring Akira back--of course we are. But... Come on. Red's nothing like Keturah. She's just--"

" _He._ "

The venom in Matt's voice stopped Hunk short, and he blinked. "Uh... What?"

" _He._ " Matt shot a dirty look Red's way. "If you're going to wear his face, you can _damn_ well respect his pronouns."

Hunk floundered through the beginnings of a response--apology or protest, Lance couldn't even begin to say. Red cut him off by holding up a hand.

"It's fine. I don't mind," Red said. "Part of me _is_ Akira, after all. It... it fits. If that's what it takes for you to be okay with this--"

"I'm never going to be okay with this," Matt snapped. "I am _so_ far from okay with this. And you're _damn_ lucky I care too much about my team to abandon them, because right now, I don't want anything to do with you. I won't want to talk to you, I don't even want to be your paladin anymore."

Red's breath hitched, eyes going wide as Matt slapped away Nyma's encroaching hand and turned away.

"I need some air," he muttered, shoving his way through the dumbstruck audience standing between him and the exit. "Don't follow me," he added, seemingly to the room at large, as no one had so much as coughed.

The silence that descended in his wake was absolute, and painfully stifling--but nothing was worse than the naked heartbreak on Red's face that lasted for only a moment before Red turned and quietly slipped past Keith and Shiro, twisting so as not to brush up against them. There was a ladder behind them, and Red disappeared up it in a flash, leaving the rest of them to try to figure out where to go from here.


	17. Natural History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Oriande has moved past its prime, and the kotha spirits of Voltron are aging once more, which means Voltron will eventually cease to exist. The Reds and Nyma returned from Oriande, Red having merged with Akira. The team is... less than thrilled with how things went down--and Red explaining that it's permanent didn't help matters. There was a big confrontation inside the Red Lion that ended with Matt storming off and Red disappearing deeper into the lion.

Akira's absence hung over the castle-ship like a pall. Not just his physical absence (though it was true that Meri hadn't seen any sign of him--of Red--since the explosion in Red's hangar last night.)

It was the way Shiro, Keith, and the Holts had basically dropped off the face of the universe. They'd all skipped dinner last night, and Allura had confided that Shiro had skipped out on their usual meditation sessions in Black's Heart this morning. It was the way everyone was quieter and more cautious today--many of them mourning, _all_ of them afraid to say or do something that would tip the uneasy balance they'd struck.

Akira was gone. No one said as much, but Meri knew they were all thinking it. And, whether out loud or inside their own head, everyone was couching it in those vague terms. He was _gone._ He was _absent._ Not dead--no one was ready to deal with that possibility. It was like they were all waiting for things to go back to the way they were before, for Akira to come back and crack some joke about the glum mood.

Meri missed him already.

She was no stranger to missing someone who wasn't dead. She'd missed and mourned Allura and Coran every day she'd spent on Earth, longing for they day they were reunited and dreading the discovery that they had already passed. This was that same breathless anticipation. Anxious, in every sense of the word. Expectant and nervous and paralyzed by the unknown.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for Red to put in an appearance, to remind them all that they existed—that _she_ existed? Even inside her own head, Meri didn’t know how to think of Red. They’d given no indication how they wanted to be referred to, beyond not fighting Matt’s use of Akira’s pronouns. But that didn’t feel right. Red had always been _she_ , and Akira had always been _he_ , and if the new Red really was both of them, either should have felt right, but somehow neither did.

Most of the others--on the rare occasion they spoke of Red--had defaulted to the neutral, and more and more, Meri found herself doing the same. She didn’t know, and so she did her best to soften the dissonance.

It didn’t work.

It was silly to think that the castle was bigger without Akira in it, but that was how it seemed. The half-empty dining hall felt downright cavernous, the corridor on the residential floor stretched for endless silent miles. The door to Akira's bedroom, which had gone unoccupied last night, loomed large in her periphery as she passed it.

(She knew it had been empty because she'd checked. Late at night after everyone else was in bed. Cursing herself and dreading a stilted conversation with Red if it turned out they were there, after all.)

But no one had been there, and Meri had spent half the night staring at the ceiling as the hours crept by.

Today was moving, if possible, even more slowly. Meri had no real energy for battle, but she went out with Lance to check on reports of a massing Galra fleet just for something to do.

There was no fleet, and Meri couldn't believe she was actually disappointed by that.

But returning to the castle only reminded her why she'd been so eager to get away, and she wandered eerily deserted hallways in search of a new distraction. She could almost believe the entire castle had gone to ground to avoid the tight-wound paladins, except of course that that was ridiculous, and it was pure chance that she hadn't run into a single person in the last hour.

Her wanderings brought her, eventually, back to the residential floor, where soft voices emanated from Shiro and Matt's bedroom--enough voices to guess that it was more than just Shiro and Matt holed up in there. Meri almost knocked on the door, but stopped herself. What would she say, anyway? _Sorry about Akira. It really sucks that he_ _decided to martyr himself for the greater good_ _._

She respected all of them too much for that.

So instead, she wandered on, until she found Hunk and Shay holed up in one of the smaller lounges off the main hallway.

"Hey," she said, leaning her head into the room. "How you holding up?"

Shay looked up, blinking a few times as she processed Meri's arrival. She offered a small smile--tired, and sad, but even yesterday's Shay wouldn't have been able to manage that much. "I am... well," she said, setting her tablet on her lap. "My apologies if I worried you."

Meri pursed her lips. "What are you apologizing for? What happened to that Balmera was horrific." She didn't say that Shay had every right to have had an emotional breakdown after witnessing it, but it was true. The last time Meri had seen her, the team had just returned from the remains of the Balmera, and Shay had fled, deeply distraught. Meri didn’t need Coran’s adjunct powers to feel it in the air.

"Working on something?"

"Ideas for how to deal with the Vkullor," Hunk said, which ruined Meri's hopes to turn the conversation to something more cheerful than mass murder.

Shay stared at her hands. "I needed to do something. To feel as though we were making progress."

"Pidge and I started the list the other day," Hunk explained. "A lot of it is probably never going to work, but some of it has potential. We just... needed more information. So we're getting it."

Meri sat next to him and peered at his tablet screen. He'd found some sort of textbook or encyclopedia entry on Vkullor and looked to be reading up on their habitat and behavior.

"Need some help?" Meri asked, though truth be told Vkullor were the last thing she wanted to be reading about right now.

Hunk and Shay seemed to appreciate the help, though--and the company. And if it wasn’t the cheeriest of activities, they at least had each other there to offer distractions and a sympathetic hug when the reality of the situation became a little too daunting.

* * *

The inside of Matt and Shiro’s room was dark and stale, crowded with five people crammed in here, piled on the bed and on the room’s two chairs Packaged food and discarded wrappers peppered the blankets and pillows that had formed three extra beds last night.

It was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began, and not just because they’d all trampled over the nest more than once on their way to the bathroom or to grab another ration bar from the stash Coran had delivered earlier in the day. Pidge had erased the dividing lines last night when they’d latched onto Keith, curled against his side and shaking as they tried to pretend they were sleeping.

They weren’t the only one who’d spent the better part of the night wrestling with their own thoughts. Keith had stayed flat on his back, one arm curled loosely around Pidge’s shoulders, his eyes fixed on the faint brush of light on the ceiling where the bedside clock’s glow pooled, his ears swiveling to chase the hushed strains of Matt and Shiro’s conversation.

He didn’t catch much. They were huddled up together, their voices muffed in the space between them and softer than a whisper on top of that. They had to be talking about Akira, though. There was nothing else it could have been.

Shiro and Karen had roused themselves enough for showers once morning finally broke, but none of the others had so far. Keith barely had the will to eat. The ration bars were bland and tough, but at least they filled his stomach, and required little time or energy to do so.

Keith hated to call it mourning, but that was what it was. The same as when Ryner died, and everything else suddenly seemed so much less important.

A day passed without Keith hardly noticing it. Matt ranted for a while about Red, Pidge swore to them all that they would bring Akira back, and Karen quietly pushed food and water on them all, and coaxed them all to bed that night, humming a song until Keith drowsed, Pidge once more wedged against his side.

Karen made them all go to breakfast with the team the next day. Keith would've rather done just about anything else, but after two nights of poor sleep, he was too tired to put up any real protest. Shiro, of course, hardly needed someone else to suggest it. His own sense of responsibility was probably already kicking him in the pants. And Pidge seemed to just want to fly under the radar.

The real issue, then, was Matt.

"I told you, I'm not hungry."

Karen stood beside Matt, who still sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, slumped against the wall and fiddling with the hoodie Pidge had dumped on his head. He refused to meet Karen's eyes, and Keith fidgeted, glancing over his shoulder at the door. He wasn't exactly excited to face the team, but it might be worth it to escape the awkward tension filling the room.

"You don't need to eat," Karen said, as though the very idea was absurd. "But I'm not letting you hide in here for the rest of your life."

Matt's eye twitched. "I wasn't planning on it."

Karen clucked her tongue. "Up. Now."

Matt fought it, but Karen wasn't about to be denied. She grabbed Matt under the arms and hauled him up with surprising ease. The entire Holt family was on the petite side, but Matt and Pidge had put on some muscle mass as paladins.

Now that Keith cared to notice, Karen was no twig herself, though she tended to hide her build under sweaters and blazers. She nevertheless had Matt on his feet in an instant, and had pushed him toward the door before he'd recovered from his shock.

Pidge fell into step beside Matt, both of them trailing behind Keith and Shiro, with Karen leading the way.

"When did Mom get so strong?" Pidge whispered, to which Matt gave only an indistinct grunt.

Keith's ears twitched, and he bit down on a grin as he watched Karen up ahead. She was too far away to have heard, so of course she didn't react, but he couldn't help but read a certain amount of swagger into her gait.

His good humor faded somewhat when they reached the kitchens, where half the team was already gathered for breakfast. Val, Meri, and Hunk seemed to barely be awake, but they straightened, blinking, as a hush fell over the room.

Akani was the first to move, plopping down five plates of pancakes in quick succession, like she'd been waiting for their arrival. Lance appeared a moment later between Keith and Shiro, seemingly from nowhere. He squeezed Shiro's shoulder and looped an arm around Keith's neck.

"Hey," he said, kissing the sensitive spot just below Keith's ear and making him shiver.

"Hey," Keith said. He wasn't sure what his voice sounded like, between poor sleep last night, tumultuous emotions, and now a sudden flustered heat making everything a little more intense.

Lance smiled to himself, steering them to the open seats along the counter where Akani had set their food. Nyma passed Lance his own plate before settling in on Keith's other side, leaving room beyond for the Holts. The next half hour passed mostly in stilted silence, a few people trying to strike up conversation, only for it to fizzle out the next time someone else walked in.

Notably, Akira--Red--whichever--didn't put in an appearance.

Keith only picked at his food, no more hungry today than he had been since leaving for Oriande, but he forced down a few bites to appease Karen and Akani, who watched him like a pair of vultures waiting for their next meal to drop dead.

After thirty minutes or so, Allura pulled Shiro into conversation off to one side, and Keith found himself watching them for lack of anything better to hold his focus. Lance tried, but he was trying to lighten the mood for the entire room, and Keith's mind had the retention of a sieve today. Shiro and Allura both looked grim, but Shiro had adopted his leader mask, all serious and responsible, like he'd taken all his grief and distress, bottled it up, and set it with the dirty dishes until he had time to deal with it.

Keith lost track of how long he'd been watching them, time sliding by him, the conversation of the rest of the team turning to white noise in his ears.

He sat up straight, suddenly, and only afterwards realized what it was that had put him on alert. Shiro had nodded, and Allura had turned at the same time to face the others.

"Everyone finish up," she said. "We’ll give you another ten minutes, and then I want you all in the Verkuth Room."

"Which one is that one again?" Hunk asked. "Is that the one by the generator room?"

Pidge shook their head. "No, it's the one with the holo-projector and the comfy chairs."

"Ohh... In the hallway that sounds like it's haunted?"

Val turned, her fork hanging out of her mouth. "Sorry, what?"

"You haven't heard it?" Lance asked, lunging forward to look around Keith at his cousin. "There's something freaky about that hallway."

Pidge rolled their eyes. "The vents are a little echoey. That's it."

"Says you."

Shiro cleared his throat. "Ten minutes. We need to talk next steps."

That sobered everyone up, and one by one they all swallowed or tossed the last of their breakfast, stacking their plates in the sanitizer and filing out of the kitchen. Keith still didn’t have much of an appetite, but he forced himself to take a few more bites to appease Karen, who was watching him from the corner of the counter like she was considering coming to hand-feed him.

After Matt dumped his half-full plate without remorse and walked out, though, Keith gave up the effort. While Karen was still glowering after Matt, Keith scraped the last quarter of his pancake into the trash.

Nervous energy filled the Verkuth Room as people wandered in and claimed their seats. There was a reason this was one of the paladins' favorite spots for extended meetings. Not only was it one of the few places that had enough seating without feeling like an amphitheater, but these seats weren't the stiff, uncomfortable chairs found in so many of the diplomatic areas (chairs Allura claimed were adapted to Altean physiology, but which Meri said were only adapted to forcing so-called proper posture.)

Here it was almost too comfortable, and Keith and Matt crammed themselves together onto a small sofa, Matt crossing his arms and glaring at the room, Keith leaning against him with his legs pulled up on the edge of the cushion.

Shiro and Allura were the last to arrive, Layeni and Coran on their heels.

"All right," Shiro said. "Let's get right to it." He crossed to the stand at the center of the room and grabbed the small tablet controller before taking a seat. He tapped the screen, and the projector hummed to life, spilling a network of stars into the air over the projector's stand.

Allura stood and swept toward the center of the room, her fingers trailing through the hologram and leaving swirls of blue light behind as the image reformed. "The Greater Chettok Galaxy," she said. "Eighty-one inhabited systems comprising two hundred and nine individual words and moons, plus an unknown number of prison worlds and isolated habitats."

Keith leaned forward, suddenly much more interested in this meeting. "More resistance strongholds than Imperial prisons, from what I've heard," he said.

Allura stopped, turning to Keith with an intensity that silenced him at once.

"You know about Greater Chettok?" Shiro asked, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees.

Keith scowled. "Of course I do. Not a lot, but it was Zarkon's biggest victory in five hundred years. Anyone who had any part of it still brags about it _constantly_. Plus, like, half of Zarkon's forces are still stationed in the area. Maybe fewer now, I'm not sure. Voltron wasn't exactly a factor last time I sat in on one of Zarkon’s military addresses.”

"True enough,” Allura said. “But from what we’ve been able to gather, there is still a considerable military presence in the area.” She turned to the rest of the paladins. “The Greater Chettok Galaxy is Zarkon's most recent conquest. He launched the first attack nearly fifty years ago, sweeping through dozens of systems before those that remained mounted a coordinated defense. They stalled Zarkon's forces for years, sometimes gaining ground, sometimes losing it. In the end, it wasn't enough."

"Zarkon likes to say he took Greater Chettok ten years ago," Keith supplied. "That's when he executed the last general of the Chettok Alliance. Truth is, the locals just changed tactics after that. Turned to sabotage and guerrilla warfare."

Allura nodded. "We've been having the Accords forward us as much information as they can. By all accounts, Greater Chettok is still the frontlines of this war. They've been fighting alone for decades and holding their own. Winning back outposts and colonies, in some cases. If we can join Voltron's focused offensive to their experience and manpower--"

"We'd have Zarkon running scared," Pidge said, leaning forward with a devilish grin on their face.

"Not to be a downer, but it's not that simple," Shiro said. "If we concentrate the war to one battlefield, Zarkon will be able to send everything he has at us, instead of splitting his attention between two enemies. We'll need to go into this fight prepared, and with our full strength. Hit hard and fast and take the advantage early."

"What we _need_ ," Lance said, "is to have the entire Coalition on our side."

Keith glanced at him, sidelong, trying to place the taut tone in his voice. His lips were pursed, and he slouched back in his seat with his arms crossed and one leg bouncing. His eyebrow quirked irritably.

The way Allura and Shiro looked at each other, too perfectly blank-faced, said they'd been talking too much lately about exactly this.

"We've been in talks," Allura said carefully. "Most of the other member worlds agree that this is a smart move. If we hit a few Imperial strongholds to weaken their control, stage a few jailbreaks to strengthen the resistance..." She glanced at Shiro. "Many of our allies who have fleets of their own have already pledged conditional support."

"Conditional?" Nyma asked.

Allura stared at the hologram, her lips pursed. It was Shiro who answered. "They're worried about the Vkullor. Afraid if they put themselves out to fight back, Zarkon will target their planet next."

"So, what?" Hunk asked. "We kill the Vkullor and then they'll help?" He laughed, the sound high and thin. "Cool. War might be over by then, though."

"We've said as much," Allura said. "A few worlds remain adamant, but the larger portion are realists. They have agreed to act, provided we have a solid plan in place to at least divert the Vkullor, should Zarkon send it out."

Val scratched her chin, her eyes roving around the room. "... _Do_ we have a solid plan? No, scratch that. Do we have _a plan_?"

"We've been working on that, actually," Meri said. "I wouldn't say we have a plan yet, but we've got some ideas."

Allura tapped the projector, and the holo-map winked out. She stepped aside, gesturing Meri forward. Meri only looked to Hunk, who sighed and took center stage, accepting the tablet from Shiro. He fiddled with the it for a moment before setting it aside, the projector still dark.

"Okay," he said. "So Pidge and I started throwing ideas around, and Shay and Meri helped me start to research some of them."

"Ideas like what?" Keith asked.

Pidge shrugged. "Lots of things. Most of them terrible and stupidly dangerous, but that's what the research was for. Sorry I didn't help with that, by the way," they added with a guilty look at Hunk, who only scowled at them like he was considering telling them off for apologizing.

Instead, he only rolled his eyes. "All right. Well, we started with the basics. Natural history and video files in the castle's archives. Things like that. Research on Vkullor is pretty sparse, but it's a baseline, right? And we thought, if we could figure out what usually kills Vkullor, maybe that'd be a step toward killing this one ourselves." He paused, pursing his lips. "So, okay, a lot of it wasn't super helpful. The leading cause of death among Vkullor is actually the mating process--I guess they're sort of like the black widows of deep space. The females have been known to eat their mates, and the egg-laying process is, uh... not gentle. So most Vkullor only mate once before they kick it."

Meri coughed pointedly, and Hunk cleared his throat.

"Right, uh. So that's obviously not gonna help us. And it looks like the general assumption is that most other Vkullor died of old age or territory disputes. But there was one interesting thing we found in all these observations. Every now and then someone would stumble across a dying Vkullor. One that wasn't particularly old, but was weak and apathetic. Wouldn't try to attack nearby worlds, even though it looked like it was starving--or it would try, but it wouldn't do as much damage as it should have, or the Vkullor would hang around for _days_ afterward, feeding, we assume. Except that it usually only takes a few minutes to an hour for a Vkullor to feed once it's cracked a planet open."

"So, what?" Shiro asked. "Were they sick?"

"That's one theory," Hunk said. "And we're still looking for any mention of what diseases they might have had. If we can infect it--weaken it to the degree we're seeing in some of these records--it wouldn't even be much of a threat anymore."

Matt quirked an eyebrow. "You want to give the planet-eating monster a cold?"

"If it means that planet-eating monster can no longer eat planets?" Meri asked. "Yes. We're nowhere near being able to fight this thing head on, so we're going to have to get creative."

"We're still reviewing the video files of the attack on Daibazaal and a couple other encounters," Hunk said. "They're hard to watch, but it doesn't look like anyone has ever really analyzed them. Or if they did, we don't have those files. We're hoping we'll be able to figure something out--some particularly vulnerable place, anatomically speaking, or a type of attack that does more damage. Some of the weakened Vkullor people found looked like they'd been in fights with other Vkullor, so maybe we can find patterns in their wounds. We’re going to have to concentrate our fire somewhere, so we might as well pick the right spot."

Allura nodded. "Keep at it." She glanced around the room. "I know it's a lot to ask, because Vkullor attacks are... graphic. But if anyone else is up to it, I'd ask for your help. We'll want as many pairs of eyes on this footage as possible to try to identify the Vkullor's weaknesses."

The thought of watching the Vkullor attack that had killed the homeworld chilled Keith to the bone, and quite frankly, he wanted nothing to do with those video files, but he nodded anyway. If Shay was forcing herself to do this, after watching the Vkullor attack Metos and dealing with the aftermath, then the least Keith could do was offer a little bit of backup.

"What happens if we don't find anything in the videos?" Lance asked. "I mean, we've got a few leads here, but I don't think I'm being overly cynical when I say that this isn't going to be enough to satisfy the Coalition."

Shiro sighed heavily. "No," he said. "It won't be. It was hard enough to get them to agree to move forward before the Vkullor was actually dead."

Shay frowned. "We have nearly exhausted the castle's records," she said. "If we need more, we will need to find a larger archive."

"How about Olkarion?" Val offered.

For an awkward moment, no one said anything. Keith glanced at Pidge, who was staring hard at the floor, not acknowledging Keith or Val or anyone else.

Then again, a glance around the room showed more people pointedly not looking at Pidge, though Keith was sure they all must have been thinking the same thing. It had been not quite six weeks since Ryner's death, which wasn't nearly enough time for the sting of it to fade--for Pidge more than anyone else. Any reminder, however oblique, was dangerous territory. Olkarion itself?

Well, Keith certainly wouldn't have been the one to bring it up.

But Val just went on watching Pidge, quietly. Not pitying, or wary, just... patient. Keith supposed, Val and Pidge being copilots now, they shared a certain understanding.

And when Pidge finally looked up, they looked calmer than Keith would have expected. Grim, perhaps, but settled.

"That's a good idea," they said. "The Olkari have been traveling the universe almost as long as Alteans, and they still have a lot of records from before the Empire. If anyone's going to have information on Vkullor, it will be them."

Shiro nodded slowly, glancing Allura's way. "You're right. We want to move on the Greater Chettok as quickly as possible, which--along with the fact that the Vkullor is the biggest threat on the board right now--means that this should be our top priority. We'll send a small team to Olkarion, no more than one lion."

"I'll go," Pidge said, interrupting the rest of what Shiro had been about to say. He stopped, staring at them, and Keith shrank back into the couch. He didn't want to say or do anything that might come across as an argument. Bad enough that Shiro looked like he wanted to say something.

If he had, Pidge probably would have torn him apart then and there.

"All right," Allura said, preempting what could have been an ugly battle. "Pidge will head up the Olkarion team. Pick one or two others to go with you, in case you run into any trouble. The rest of us will stay here, continue to answer distress calls, and go through the old recordings of Vkullor. Hopefully somewhere in all of that, we'll find a viable plan."

Shiro nodded. "Head out as soon as you can," he said to Pidge. "Well call ahead so the Olkari leaders know you're coming. Keep us updated. If it looks like it's going to take more than a few days, we may have to leave it to the Olkari to dig up the raw data, and we'll use it to build a plan once they forward it on to us."

Pidge nodded. "Do we have anything else to talk about right now, or are we done?"

A weighted glance passed between Shiro and Allura, and Keith frowned as he tried to decipher it.

"That's all," Shiro finally said. "Unless someone else has something to discuss...?"

He paused, but no one else volunteered anything, and one final nod from Shiro dismissed them. Pidge headed for the door at once, and Matt leaped to his feet to chase after. Keith followed mostly out of habit, and because he didn't want to leave himself exposed to pity or comfort from the other paladins. Breakfast had been bad enough.

"You're sure about this?" Matt asked, slowing as Pidge stopped in the corridor outside the meeting room.

Pidge glanced over their shoulder, lips pursed.

Matt raised his hands. "I don't mean it like that. I just mean... We've all had a rough go of it lately. I don't think any of us would argue about that. I just want to know that you're not pushing yourself into something you're not ready for because you feel like you have to."

"I'm not." Pidge paused, then let out a sigh, their shoulders relaxing. "Honestly? I was thinking about going to Olkarion anyway. This is just a better excuse than baseless hope."

Keith's ear flicked restlessly. "What do you mean? About the Vkullor?"

Pidge shook their head. They glanced past Matt, past Keith, back toward the meeting room, where most of the others were still gathered, some clustered around Hunk--to figure out when and how to watch the archived footage, presumably--others conferring with Shiro or Allura.

Keith frowned at the scene for several seconds before turning back to Pidge, who shifted their weight to the other foot and scratched their cheek.

"Actually... I wanted to have the Olkari take a look at Red." Their face twitched, a flicker of a scowl appearing and disappearing in an instant. "Akira-Red, I mean. Not the lion. Maybe the lion, too, I don't know." They huffed, finally meeting Matt's eyes. "Look, none of us has any clue what happened with the whole... Redkira situation, or whether or not there's anything we can do to fix it."

Their eyes slipped away again, so they probably didn't see the way Matt's face went suddenly blank, or the way he seemed to have stopped breathing. "You think... They'll be able to help?"

Pidge spread their arms. "I don't know. But they know Quintessence, and they know biology and technology, and about a billion other things. Maybe they'll have some insight." They wrinkled their nose. "Of course, I have no idea if Red will even agree to _go_ , but... I guess I'm gonna find out." They turned back to Matt, their expression softening. "Do you two want to come? Assuming Red does agree, I mean?"

"You're okay with that?" Keith asked, a little stunned.

They shrugged, flashing a small smile. "I mean, let's face it. If I'm over here looking for a way to bring Akira back, are either of you going to be any help to the rest of the team?"

"No," Keith said at once. Matt gave a brief, offended look, but he couldn't deny it, either. "Are you going to tell Shiro?"

"I wasn't, no. But I won't stop you if you want to."

Matt shot a look over his shoulder. "He has enough on his mind right now. If we find anything one way or the other, then we'll tell him, but right now, this is just a shot in the dark. He wouldn't let himself leave the front lines for that--let alone leave Allura to deal with the Coalition alone--so why make him obsess over it, right?"

He didn't sound convinced, but Pidge wasn't arguing, and Keith didn't honestly want to say anything to anyone for fear that just saying it out loud would ruin whatever chance they had of success.

Pidge grimaced. "Okay, then. Let's go find Red, I guess."

* * *

The adjunct bond was evolving.

Karen didn't know how to feel about that, considering it was the adjunct bond that had led Akira to lose himself.

That wasn't entirely fair, and Karen knew that, but she was raw and emotional after comforting her family in the wake of Akira's sacrifice, and she was feeling less generous than usual. Red had chosen Akira so she could wield him as a weapon to shatter her own crystal, and then she’d taken his body to use as her own.

Green wouldn't do that. Couldn't do it, so far as Karen knew. And considering she _knew_ by virtue of the adjunct bond, borrowing on Green's own knowledge, it was as good as fact. Red had entered Akira in Oriande, and that union had radiated backwards through time, bringing their minds into contact in an echo of what was to come.

Karen, having never been to Oriande--and having neither the inclination nor, likely, the need to ever go--would never have the occasion to take on Green's spirit.

All the logic in the world couldn't make Karen more comfortable with the recent changes she'd noticed in the bond. And it wasn’t just her. Coran had been sensing emotions he was certain didn't belong to any of his paladins. Sometimes he could identify their source, sometimes not. Karen, at the same time, had started to become aware that some of the things she intuited through the bond couldn't possibly have come from Green.

It was Keturah's last attack that had clued her in. She'd known that Keturah had taken control of Matt, that she could do the same to Keith, and that it was a perversion of the paladin bond--all before Pidge had known more than a fraction of that. By Green's own admission, she'd discovered that particular truth at the same moment Karen had, and from the same source: Red.

It was inconsistent, as of yet. Karen didn't know _everything_ the other lions knew all the time. But sometimes she did.

Sometimes she knew, without looking for the knowledge or even particularly wanting it, that Red was in distress, and that they were not not alone.

She knew, at the same time, that Pidge was going down to Red's hangar to talk to them.

She didn't like it, not least of all because the knowledge that came from Red was clouded--an artifact of their current state or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, Karen wasn't sure, but it left her feeling uncomfortable and anxious.

Coran frowned at her; they'd been talking research strategies in the wake of the Vkullor discussion when the knowledge had hit her out of the blue, a sudden cold rush like she'd just remembered something awful that had slipped her mind.

"Everything all right?" Coran asked.

Karen offered him a feeble smile. "I'm not sure. It's the bond." She hesitated, glancing toward the open door. There was no one in the hall outside, but she felt a tug and knew Pidge had only just left, together with Keith and Matt. When she turned back, she found only sympathy and understanding on Coran's face.

"Go on," he said. "You'll never rest unless you do."

A wry smile tugged at Karen's lips. "Speaking from experience?"

Coran only smiled and waved her on, and Karen couldn't resist the pull of the bond much longer. She hurried out of the conference room, pausing only briefly in the hallway before striking out along the shortest route to the Red Lion's hangar--the shortest route according to Green, whose sense of direction in the castle-ship Karen trusted far beyond her own.

Pidge and the others must have been dragging their feet--understandable, with the way Matt especially had reacted to Red taking over Akira's body. In any case, Karen caught up to them a short distance away from the hangar. Pidge seemed unsurprised to see Karen there, but Matt gave a start and Keith tried to hide behind him. Karen pretended not to notice.

"Hey, Mom," Pidge said. "Green tell you what we're doing?"

"The broad strokes of it," Karen said. "You're taking Keith and Matt with you to Olkarion?"

Pidge nodded. "I wouldn't mind having you along, either. If only because you might notice something we don't. But I guess that's true of you watching the Vkullor footage, too." They pursed their lips.

Karen placed a hand on their head and started them walking again toward the hangar. "I can do both, Pidge. It's not like I'd be doing any missions if I stayed, anyway. I'll ask Hunk to send me the files, and I'll watch them in between meetings and researching blitzes on Olkarion." She paused, watching Pidge out of the corner of her eye. "You're headed for Red's hangar," she observed. "Not leaving right this second, though, I'm guessing."

"No..." Pidge scratched the back of their head. "We're asking if Red will come with us to Olkarion. I mean. It sounds like the lion won't fly without Red in it, so they kind of don't have a choice, but..."

The last missing piece clicked into place, and it was like someone had just thrown back the curtains on a brilliantly sunny day. "Ah," she said, losing track of her feet for a moment as the realization sank in. "You want to have someone examine Red."

"You don't have to make it sound so clinical."

Karen only waited, and eventually Pidge sighed.

"I mean... yeah, basically." They stopped walking and turned toward her, desperation lurking in their eyes. "If there's any way to get Akira back, we have to try it. We owe it to him. I just think the Olkari might be able to help."

"I never said I disagreed with you," Karen said. "I just don't want you to get your hopes up. I doubt anyone has ever seen something like this. There may not be a way to undo it."

"There is," Pidge said, shoving their hands into their pockets as they rounded the last corner to Red's hangar. "There has to be."

Karen dropped the issue. She was skeptical, and she was afraid that Pidge was going to wind up disappointed, but arguing with them at this point wouldn't accomplish anything except making Pidge shut her out.

In any case, they'd arrived at the hangar, and Karen's scalp prickled as the hazy, half-hidden awareness of Red returned. She had the sense of being watched, and her steps slowed automatically before she forced herself to move on, entering the hangar ahead of Pidge, Matt, and Keith.

It was impossible, still, to see Red and not think _Akira_ , but that wasn't what dominated her attention. Red sat on the lion's paw, one leg pulled up and their arms wrapped around it, their head leaning on their knee and cocked to one side.

Standing on the ground beside them, leaning against the lion's paw, was Keena, looking for all the world like she belonged here.

A growl tickled the back of Karen's throat for an instant before she stopped it, startled that it had been her first reaction at all. Either she'd been picking habits up from the Galra around her or this was another new development of the adjunct bond, and either way she would rather it stop.

No one seemed to have heard her slip, thankfully--perhaps because Keith was growling, too, and making no attempt to hide it, and Matt's breath hissed through his teeth as he shifted to put himself between Keith and his mother.

Red looked up, emotion flickering across their face before it was tucked safely away, out of sight, a careful blandness that reeked of a lie taking its place.

Keena turned to follow Red's gaze, an equally fake smile splitting her face. "Keithka! And the Holts, too. Lovely to see you."

"What are you doing here?" Matt asked, and Karen hurried to keep pace with him as he crossed the hangar. He looked ready to throw down with Keena, and Karen figured she should be ready to step in. Not that she would have blamed him, or had any leg to stand on given her own history with the woman, but tensions were running far too high right now, and any lapse in judgment was liable to turn uglier than anyone wanted.

Keena held up her hands, doing her best to look innocent. "Call it curiosity," she said. "I heard what happened to Commander Shirogane."

There was no derision in the way she said the name, but it managed to sound condescending all the same, and Karen bristled. She crossed her arms, hovering just behind Matt's shoulder, hoping that the visual reminder that she had someone to be responsible for would keep her focused.

"So, what?" Matt asked. "You came down here to gawk?"

Keena held her hands up higher. "Well, honestly, I thought it was just a rumor. I came down here looking for Keith, but when I realized he wasn't here, I just had to sate my curiosity."

"We were only talking," Red offered, letting their foot drop off the side of the lion's paw.

Matt's head twitched to the side, and though Karen couldn't see his face, the way Red flinched back said that he was glaring sharply enough to cut. He said nothing to them, though, just turned back to Keena. "Get out."

She straightened, touching one hand to her chest. "I beg your pardon?"

"I said, get out. You're not allowed in here."

"This is the Red Lion's hangar, is it not? Red herself invited me in. I'd say--"

" _Get out!_ " Matt was shaking now, and Karen put a hand on his shoulder to forestall any unfortunate decisions. "I don't care what Red said. _Red_ has a track record of ignoring boundaries. Kind of like someone else I know."

Red's shoulders pulled up, hunching in like they were trying to make themself smaller. Keena, in contrast, only grew sharper--her smile, her eyes, her posture. She wasn't yet past the line of plastered-on civility, but her patience, Karen knew, had to be wearing thin.

"I hardly think you have any right to decide what Red or I choose to do with our time."

"That's rich, coming from you," Matt hissed.

Red cringed. "Matt..."

He rounded on them. "And _you_. You know what _she’_ _s_ like. What she did." Keith suddenly tensed, breathing in so sharply it drew Karen's eye his way, but Matt forged on, oblivious. "The Red I knew wouldn't be so buddy-buddy with the asshole who tried to manipulate her own son into becoming the next Galra Emperor."

Karen whipped her head back toward Matt, his words ringing in her ears and reverberating in her gut, stirring up an old and deep-seated anger that had been mostly dormant since she'd punched Keena on New Altea. "She _what_?"

Keith surged forward before anyone could answer, grabbing Matt by the arm and making Matt wince. He turned, mouth open to protest, but saw something on Keith's face that brought him up short.

That was fine. Karen was angry enough for the both of them, pushing past Matt and Keith to get in Keena's face. "You should leave."

Keena bristled. "I don't think you have any more say in--"

" _Leave,_ " Karen growled. "I'm not going to tell you again."

For a moment, Karen thought she was going to make a fuss of it. The woman who manipulated her son, lied to everyone around her, plotted to make her son what was sure to be a puppet at the head of the empire she was _supposed_ to be trying to bring down... Karen wouldn't put it past her to fight when cornered. She seemed the type to kill the witnesses once she decided lying was no longer an option.

Karen stood her ground, though she made a mental note of where her kids were, just in case it came to that. Pidge was the most likely to keep their head; she would need to tell them to call Coran, or maybe the Guard. There wasn't a formal security force on the castle-ship; so far they hadn't needed one, but the Guard was as close as they got, and Karen was sure Layeni wouldn't take kindly to Keena's plotting.

After a few long, breathless seconds, though, Keena yielded, holding up her hands and pushing away from the Red Lion's paw. "All right, all right. I'll go. I'll be sure to ask your permission the next time I want to have a friendly chat with anyone on this ship."

Matt looked like he wanted to say something to that, but Karen cut him off with a hand on his wrist. Keena was trying to get a rise out of them, trying to make them start the fight so she could claim self-defense. Karen wouldn't fall for it, and she wouldn't let Matt be goaded into it, either.

She turned to watch Keena leave, Matt and Pidge openly glaring beside her.

Keith was already headed for the elevator in the opposite corner, his head down and his arms crossed over his chest. Karen caught sight of the movement and turned, anger turning to ice in her chest. "Keith?"

Matt spun, then froze in Karen's hold. He muttered a curse, then took off after Keith, calling his name with a breathless sort of worry. Keith didn't turn, and only stopped when Matt grabbed him by the arm.

"Keith, hey."

"You promised you wouldn't tell anyone."

Karen's breath caught at the rumble of Keith’s voice, and Matt recoiled, dropping Keith's arm like he'd been burned. "I--I didn't mean to."

"Yeah, well, you did." Keith turned, his ears slanting back and his fangs bared.

Matt's hands curled around the collar of his shirt. "Sorry."

Keith sighed, turning back toward the elevator. As quickly as the anger had come on, it vanished, leaving him small and hunched and uncertain. "It's fine."

He left without another word, leaving all three Holts in awkward silence. Red shifted on their perch on the lion's paw, and Karen pinned them with a glare.

"You knew," she said. "What that woman's been doing to Keith."

Red squirmed. "I try not to pry."

"Cut the bullshit," Matt said. "We've all been inside each other's heads too much for that. Red knew," he said to Karen. "We both did."

Karen nodded, her eyes never leaving Red. "Then why let her in here? Why act like she's a friend when you know damn well she doesn't deserve your respect, much less your friendship?"

Red's lips pressed into a thin line, and they glared back at Karen--the closest she had yet seen them to genuine anger. For a moment, she thought they might actually argue.

Instead, they slid off the lion's paw and turned toward the open ramp. "You came here to ask me to go with you to Olkarion, right?" They shoved their hands in their pockets, head down as they headed up the ramp. "The answer is yes. I'll be here whenever you're ready to go."

* * *

Matt gave Keith an hour to calm down, an hour to fume and stew and maybe to find Lance or Shiro and rant to them.

Except, well, he wasn't going to do that, was he? Matt, Thace, and Red were the only ones who knew about Keena's plan to make Keith emperor, and Keith had wanted it to stay that way. It _would have_ stayed that way, except that Matt had to go and spill the beans. And why? Because he was too tired to think straight and already mad at Red and Keena both, and seeing them together just made everything boil over.

To Matt's surprise, Keith wasn't hiding in his own room, and he wasn't expelling his frustration down on the training deck. Instead, Matt found him in Thace's small study in the archives, curled up on an arm chair and hugging a throw pillow to his chest. When he saw Matt, his ears drooped, and he turned to glared at a spot on the floor.

"Hey," Matt said, shoving his hands in his back pockets and shifting his weight. He was keenly aware of Thace's presence, and of the inscrutable gaze he was directing Matt's way. He was waiting for something, Matt was sure. He just didn't know what. "I came to apologize."

"I already told you it's fine."

Matt wrinkled his nose. "It's not. I promised not to tell anyone about Keena's mission for you, and I broke that promise. Doesn't matter that I didn't mean to, or that Mom and Pidge are totally on the same page as me that Keena's a bitch and you did nothing wrong--" He stopped, forcing himself to breathe. He'd stayed with his family only long enough to talk his mother out of finding a way to charge Keena with treason over this--and to talk Pidge out of a more direct form of vengeance. "I'm sorry."

Keith continued to stare at the floor, his feet up on the chair and wedged against one arm. One knee was bouncing restlessly. Across the low table, Thace had set down the tablet he was working on to stare at Keith, his expression carefully neutral.

"Are they..." Keith shifted his gaze to the vicinity of Matt's feet. "Are they going to tell the others?"

"No," Matt said. "They promised not to say anything unless and until you say it's okay." He paused, opting not to say that neither of them understood why Keith was so averse to talking about it. Matt understood, to some extent. He'd felt it, at least--the shame that was tied up with Keena's request, like being picked as her puppet meant that there was something wrong with him.

More than that, Matt thought that Keith still wasn't ready to cut ties with Keena. As much as she'd hurt him, as much as he hated being around her, there was still some part of him that wanted to believe the best of her. Wanted to make her proud. Once word got out that she'd been plotting to seize control of the Empire behind the Coalition's back, and that she'd tried to manipulate Keith into helping her, Keith wouldn't be able to stay on the fence. He would have to side with Keena or condemn her, and while Matt already knew which Keith would pick, he wasn't ready to take that step. Not yet.

Sighing, Matt crossed to Keith's chair and sat on the arm, a handspan away from the feet wedged against it. "You still want to come with us to Olkarion?"

Keith shrugged.

"Cause I get it. Mom very well might smother you on the way over."

Keith looked up, brow puckering, and Matt grinned.

"I mean, yeah, mostly what she is is pissed at Keena, but..." He spread his hands. "I don't know if you've noticed, but she's already made it her campaign to be the kind of mother for you that Keena should have been. After this?" Matt whistled.

Keith was back to avoiding Matt's gaze, but he seemed to be chewing on a question, and Matt gave him time to find the right words.

"What makes you think she's trying to be my..." He shied away from the word, which kind of made Matt want to shake some sense into him. He resisted, reminding himself that if anyone needed a good shaking, it was Keena.

"Keith," he said instead, squeezing his ankle. "Mom loves you. Trust me. She was the same way with Shiro when he was selected for the Kerberos mission, and from everything I've heard she did the same thing with Akira after we were declared dead. Her and Dad both--if there’s a parental version of love at first sight, they’re both weak to it, and once they’ve claimed you, they'll take on the world for you. She probably doesn't want to overstep any boundaries, but she would steal you away from Keena in two seconds if you told her that's what you wanted. I promise you, the only thing that's changed now that she knows about the whole Emperor thing is that she's even _more_ protective of you. Pidge, too." He flashed a crooked smile. "It's annoying, but once you get them to stop smothering you, it's actually kind of nice."

Keith fiddled with a loose thread on one of the pillow's seams. "You think?"

"I _know._ " He tipped his head to the side, gauging Keith's mood, then nudged Keith's feet aside and slid backwards into the narrow space between him and the cushion. He looped an arm around Keith's neck and pulled him into a hug. "Mom and Pidge are squarely in your corner on this one, Keith. One hundred percent."

Keith let the pillow drop to the floor and leaned into the hug. "I'm really not mad at you," he muttered. "Kinda angry in general, but not at you. I'm not... I don't want to make a big deal about the whole Keena thing, but it's been long enough and she's mostly dropped it anyway, so..." He shrugged. "It's fine. That they know."

"Okay."

“That doesn’t mean I’m ready to tell the whole team.”

“That’s fine. No one’s going to tell anyone else.”

“Okay.” Keith started to say something more, then gave it up. “Okay.”

Matt rested his chin atop Keith's head, relaxing by fractions as Keith slowly melted against him. Across from them, Thace had gone back to his work without a word, apparently content to ignore what was going on three feet away. He did, however, glance up from his tablet long enough to catch Matt's eye and offer him a warm smile.

* * *

The Red Lion's hangar felt far larger today than ever before. Nyma actually had to stop at the door and brace herself to walk in. It felt too much like walking onto a battlefield during a ceasefire--the hush in the air and the frigid expectation hovering in the rafters. There was no one here that she could see, and the Red Lion was as unresponsive as the last time she'd been here. It was like the space was filled with ghosts now, all just waiting to be disturbed so they could rise up in a vengeful fury.

Shaking off her superstitions, Nyma stepped inside, hating the way her footsteps echoed in the open space.

"Hello?" she called. "Hey. Red! You in here?"

There was no answer, but a sound echoed out from the lion's open maw, a foot scraping across metal floor plates, like Red was hovering just within, watching but trying not to be seen.

Nyma didn't have the patience for that, so she just stormed up the ramp and found Red lounging in the cockpit, draped across Matt's seat. They looked so much like Akira--not just because they were in his body, but because they'd adopted his mannerisms. Nyma didn't know what to make of that. Was it a sign that Akira was still in there somewhere? Influencing Red even if he wasn't in complete control?

Or was it all Red, and they didn't know, or didn't care, that they were flaunting what they'd taken from this team when they’d fused with Akira?

"Are you going to Olkarion now, too?" Red asked, bending backwards over the arm of the chair to stare at Nyma upside down.

Nyma flicked a hand. "Please. They don't need me to tag along. I just wanted to talk to you before you left."

"Cool." Red sat upright, waving a hand over their shoulder. "So talk. Promise I won't interrupt."

Nyma pursed her lips, tamping down on her automatic urge to snark back. "I came to see how you were doing."

"Alive," Red said, the word thrown over their shoulder so flippantly that Nyma almost forgot her resolve not to snark. "Thanks for checking."

"Good," she said dryly. "That's a good baseline. I was thinking more detail than that. It's been a rough few days." She leaned her head forward, waiting for Red to offer something up. They said nothing. "Are you goinna say anything?"

"Still settling into the new body," they finally said, twisting to flash a razor-edged smile at Nyma.

And that was it. Nyma dropped the concerned act and stormed forward to loom over Red and the chair they'd claimed. "What the hell is your problem?"

Their head lolled against the seat-back and they smiled. "I think you know already. Right? I stole Akira's body. I dared to try to salvage the one weapon that might be able to stop Zarkon and his armies from conquering the entire universe. It was the right choice, but it hurt the mortals' feelings, so now I'm the bad guy."

Nyma stared at them in disgust. "Are you serious right now?"

"Completely."

It was the flash of teeth that gave it away. A snarl thinly disguised as a smile. A flash of warning in those golden eyes that looked too much like a heart on the verge of shattering. Nyma knew these tricks. She'd perfected them over the course of her ten-year career. You didn't let people in. You didn't let people see when you were hurting.

And if someone looked like they were about to turn on you, you pushed them away before they had the chance.

Nyma could have told them that things would get better. That Matt and Keith were hurting now, but they would understand in time. She wasn't sure it was true, but that wasn't why she didn't say it. She didn't say it because it wouldn't have helped. Red was cynical and defensive, and all the sympathy in the world would get turned away with sharp comments and scathing insults and words designed to goad her into a fight so Red could close the case, turn her away, tick another name off a list in their head of people who'd already given up on them.

What Red needed right now was someone like Rolo, someone with the patience and the kindness to see the good in Red and wait until they were ready to show it.

Nyma was not what Red needed. But there were other ways to crack that defensive shell wide open.

"This is because of what Matt said, isn't it?" she asked, folding her arms. "When he compared you to Keturah."

Red stiffened. The light in their eyes, dappled across their skin, actually intensified for a moment, bright enough to paint patterns on the seat cushions they were leaning against. "He can think what he wants."

"Oh, of course. It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? And I suppose you're just going to continue to refuse to see that you're following in her footsteps, aren't you? Don't want to admit you might be wrong. Is that it?"

Red was on their feet in an instant, one hand seizing the collar of Nyma's shirt, their noses close enough to touch, Red's eyes blazing molten gold too close for Nyma to look at anything else.

"Don't pretend you know anything about that woman."

Nyma blinked, proud of herself for standing her ground and not even flinching. "I know plenty. I just have to wonder if you do. I would hope so, after everything she did to you. After everything she's done to this team. But I'm not convinced you even remember any of it. You've been living this pampered life in Oriande for so long, maybe you've lost touch with the outside world. Maybe _you're_ the outsider here who doesn't know who they're dealing with."

Red's lips pulled back in a snarl, and for that instant, they looked nothing at all like Akira. "I know more than you could _possibly_ comprehend. I know who Keturah was long before she walked these halls. I knew her mind. I saw her fall. I know what she did to my vessel in this realm, what she did to the paladins, what she's done to countless nameless victims across the span of her lifetime. I know that she came to Oriande to claim me, and when she realized that it was futile, she tried to kill me instead."

Here, finally, Red's voice broke, raw pain bursting through a cool shell. It was fascinating to watch, really. How they transformed from a neutral observer, an embodiment of everything Nyma had seen and heard of Oriande--impassive, objective, impartial, and carefully removed from the woes of mortal life--into something much more... _ordinary._ Something more like the Blue Lion, more like the Red Lion Nyma had only just begun to get to know.

She thought that, maybe, Red had lost far more in all of this than any of them knew.

Red recovered their composure quickly, and Nyma let them. She was too busy trying to figure out what was going on inside that head of theirs. Red said that Akira had become a part of whatever hybrid entity was currently calling themself Red. More than that, though, it seemed as though the Red Lion's mind--soul--Quintessence--had also been a casualty of the fusion, lending memories and affection to the new Red but otherwise suppressed as much as Akira.

Nyma hoped the two of them were only suppressed, and not gone. It could just as easily be only scraps and remnants of their souls caught up inside Red, with Akira and the old Red Lion themselves both functionally dead.

A year ago, Nyma would have been too cynical to hope otherwise.

Now, as she backed off, she searched Red's face-- _Akira's_ face--for any sign that he was still in there.

"They miss you, you know," she said. "Keith and Matt. They aren't angry. They're just hurting. They just want you back."

The smile that Red gave her was too sad, too somber, and for a moment, Nyma thought that she'd found Akira after all.

But the eyes were still golden, the skin still speckled with light.

"Do yourself a favor?" they said, reaching out just far enough for their fingertips to brush Nyma's elbow. "Don't get your hopes up. There's too much inside my head right now. I don't... I don't even know who I am, really. I can't promise that any of what you want from me is still in there to be found. So just--don't. Don't expect more than what I'm giving you. That way no one has to get hurt."

Nyma didn't know what to say to that. It was too much like the old Red, who had chosen to die rather than hurt her boys. Too much like Akira, who had given up control of his own body so that Voltron could go on.

It was nothing at all like the Red she'd seen these last few days... but maybe that was just her, judging too quick and too harsh, like always.

"Keith and Matt are on their way," Red said suddenly, crisp and clear and disinterested once more. "I assume you came here alone for a reason, so if you'd like to leave unseen, now is the time to do so."

Nyma straightened, and for a moment, she almost stayed, just to chase that shadow of who Red had been, just to chase a desperate hope.

But she was better than that, and Red was back to their new self, and Nyma didn't want to argue with Matt today, or to make the trip to Olkarion any more unpleasant than it would be anyway.

So she turned and headed for the ramp, glancing one last time over her shoulder as Red disappeared into the maintenance space at the back of the cockpit. To hide, or maybe to find their composure.

Nyma supposed she was just going to have to learn to be a little more like Rolo.


	18. The Verdant Archives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Akira sacrificed himself to save Red, but the team isn't happy about it. So when Shiro and Allura asked for someone to go to Olkarion to consult on the Vkullor problem, Pidge volunteered, and brought Keith and Matt along. They're hoping for answers not only about the Vkullor, but about Akira, as well.

It was surreal, coming back to Olkarion. The last time Pidge was here, they'd hardly been able to think straight around the fresh wounds inflicted by Ryner's death. Their memories of those first few days were patchy, even now. They didn't remember _coming_ to Olkarion, only being here, being in pain. They didn't remember leaving, only the suffocating need to be gone.

Those wounds had healed now. They'd started to. The sight of Olkarion’s unfathomable mountains still brought a lump to their throat, and they struggled to breathe as Keith and Matt brought Red in for a landing on one of the levitating airfields roving across Inanimasi. The flight had been blessedly short, but there was nothing to distract Pidge from their thoughts; Karen had set up in the back with a tablet and a pair of headphones, watching some of the shorter clips of Vkullor that Hunk, Meri, and Shay had found in the archives. Red lurked dead center in the cockpit, silent, their eyes closed, one hand resting on the back of either pilot’s chair.

Keith and Matt were tense the whole way, both of them scowling. They didn't speak, didn't mess around, just made a beeline for the planet like they couldn't wait to get Red out of their heads.

Pidge, for their part, was eager to get moving, too. They doubted there was any part of this that wasn't going to remind them of Ryner, but at least once they got out there, they might be able to distract themself with researching Vkullor. (It wouldn't make them feel any better, but it was a different sort of misery.)

They'd hardly touched down before Matt was on his feet, Keith not far behind. Both were down the ramp and out of the lion by the time Red blinked themself back to awareness. It took long seconds, long enough for Karen to pack up her tablet, long enough for Pidge to have followed Matt and Keith _without_ looking like they were running away. Red frowned, rubbed their head, and Pidge slowed. For a moment, they considered going to check on Red, but Red recovered too quickly. They straightened, shook their head, and when they caught Pidge looking, they stiffened.

Pidge turned and hurried out before things could get any more awkward.

"Where to first?" Matt asked, pointedly ignoring Red as they appeared and joined the group.

"We should go to the university," Karen said. "Several of the faculty have an arrangement with the Coalition, so we shouldn't have a problem getting their aid. They'll know better than anyone where we should look, anyway."

They caught a shuttle to the university district, where Karen led the way to one particular building called the Tchilussa Center. Pidge had been here once before, but it felt far more familiar than a single visit could justify. There were no memories associated with this place, not anymore, but their echoes remained. A complicated knot of nostalgia, disdain, fondness, and regret.

"Paladins!" An Olkari man greeted them at the door, dressed in what Pidge recognized as an academic robe before it occurred to them that they could only have known that because of Ryner. Just like that, they were back to the queasy, hollow feeling of loss that they were trying so hard to escape.

The man bowed, clasping his hands at his waist. "I am Ander, professor of the Arts."

Karen nodded her head. "We spoke last time, I believe?"

Ander smiled. "A shame we had to meet under such grim circumstance. I don't suppose you're here on a cheerier errand today?"

Pidge snorted, and Karen gripped their shoulder as she offered Ander an apologetic smile. "Comparatively speaking, perhaps, but I wouldn't call it 'cheery' by any stretch. Would any of your colleagues happen to specialize in Vkullor biology?"

Ander's smile slipped, and he stared at them each in turn, his face steadily draining of color. "Oh, dear. Yes, well... We've begun to put together a team. Why don't you come sit down? I'll make some calls, try and get them over here."

Ander couldn't seem to get away from them fast enough. He showed them to a small study room--a table ringed with six chairs, with two slightly less rigid armchairs in the far corners of the room. Pidge curled up in one of these, Karen took the other, and Matt and Keith sat at the table, Matt dropping his head into his arms at once like he was going to take a nap while they waited.

More likely, he didn't want to accidentally encourage conversation with Red, who lingered in the doorway for a long moment, scanning the room like they hoped to uncover an out-of-the-way nook where they could hide to escape the awkwardness. Finding nothing, they eventually selected a chair across the table from Keith and Matt, where they sat sideways, wholly focused on the door.

It was a long, quiet wait, no one offering up conversation to break the silence. Karen popped her headphones in again and brought up the next Vkullor video for review, Keith and Matt appeared to be carrying on an exchange made up of pointed glances and drumming fingertips. Red might as well have been a statue, and Pidge?

Pidge was just trying not to be sick. This room was too familiar. The chair, the table, the glint of the overhead lights on the glass display board, all of it bolstered a bittersweet nostalgia that left them wishing they'd brought Val along. Anything to distract from the shadows of memories left over from where Ryner had been ripped out of their mind.

Forty-five minutes later, the door finally opened, revealing three Olkari Pidge didn't recognize, all dressed in academic robes. Two were almost certainly professors, judging by their sashes and the brass clasp that fastened them at the shoulder. The third wore no such sash and looked to be several decades younger than her companions--a grad student, probably, or whatever the equivalent was here on Olkarion.

"Sorry for the wait," one of the professors said, a little breathless as she bowed, her antennae swiveling frantically. "I am Ilori, professor of biology here at the university. This is my colleague, Professor Be-nat, and Andone, my student." She gestured to each of the others as she spoke. "Ander said you were here about the Vkullor issue."

Pidge nodded. "You're the experts, I take it?"

Ilori hesitated, glancing at Be-nat, who cleared his throat and sat at the table. "As close as it gets," he said. "The three of us study Destroyers, a category that includes Vkullor, but also Balmera, Weblums--anything on that scale, really. There are a few others in the concentration, like Samso and Argi; I'm sure you'll meet them later. They do have classes to see to, though, I'm afraid."

Ilori seemed to have gathered herself by now, and she smiled as she sat beside Be-nat, Andone taking the last seat, between Red and Keith, as unobtrusively as she could.

"It's been thousands of years since anyone has seen a Vkullor, you understand,” Ilori said. “No one specializes in their biology and behavior. Until recently, my focus was on Welbums and the death and decomposition of stars and planets. Be-nat coordinates our small but growing pool of Balmera consultants--they're the ones who've been helping with the defense systems, you see? Figuring out how to protect a Balmera without harming it.

"We know _of_ Vkullor, of course," she went on. "There aren't enough students in the concentration to fill up a whole roster of classes focused on our particular specialties. And we've already started digging into the archives. Something like a Vkullor reappears after thousands of years and you just have to sate your curiosity. You know?" She chuckled, clearly uncomfortable with all the attention, and adjusted her sash so it was laying correctly.

"What sort of information are you looking for?" Andone asked, leaning forward. "So far we've just been digging to see where it takes us, but I'm not sure how much of what we found is actually useful to you."

"Ultimately, anything that helps us kill it is good," Pidge said. "Specifically, we're looking for either a poison or pathogen we can use to weaken it, or something in its anatomy we can target to bring it down quickly instead of trying to deal massive trauma to something that's already nearly invulnerable to our attacks."

"If you have footage or detailed records of any successful battles against Vkullor, we would appreciate those, too," Karen added. "We'll have our people review them for potential strategies."

Illori nodded. "We'll get started straight away."

"I'll see if I can call back anyone we have posted on Balmera to help," Be-nat added. "This is going to take some time, so please, don't feel as though you have to wait for us. We'll reach out once we have something to share."

* * *

After that, there wasn't much to do. Karen would have been perfectly content to find somewhere to hole up for a few hours and make her way through the rest of the Vkullor files. She'd hardly touched the backlog, and though so far all she'd found was a bunch of destruction and death, she knew there was more to be found. There had to be.

Unfortunately, the rest of her family wasn't keen on patience at the best of times, and today it seemed asking them to sit still for another ten minutes was akin to torture. Matt and Keith grew increasingly restless, and Pidge watched them like a hawk. Karen suspected they were only waiting for someone else to make the first move so they wouldn't draw all the attention to themself.

Red had excused themself hardly a minute after the Olkari scholars left. Didn't make a fuss about it, didn't say where they were going or ask if anyone else was coming. Just left, quietly and without fanfare, disappearing before Karen could decide whether or not to stop them.

Five minutes after that, Matt slammed his hands on the table and stood.

"Okay. I'm done."

Keith looked up. "Done?"

"Done waiting. Done..." Matt waved a hand. "I'm going to go find Red, and I'm going to see if anyone's willing to help us figure out how to get Akira back."

A heavy silence followed this declaration, and no one seemed eager to break it. They didn’t want to admit just how much they were counting on the Olkari to find something, Karen suspected. They didn’t want to jinx it, when the chances of finding anything at all were already slim.

But Pidge and Keith were as tired of waiting as Matt, and Karen wasn't about to send them running off alone. She sighed, sliding her tablet and headphones back into her bag, and followed her kids out of the study room.

They took a hasty but meandering tour of the building, never staying long in one place but stopping at every door and hallway to check for signs of Red. They'd only been gone five minutes, but not even their paladins seemed to know where they were now.

When they finally found Red, however, it was in the last place Karen would have expected.

"Ander?" Matt asked, stopping with one hand still on the door frame of the lab. Red sat on a swiveling chair near one lab bench, a spider-like device on their head, one hand caught between both of Ander's, and another Olkari walking away with what looked alarmingly like a vial of blood.

Karen brushed past her children, protective instincts flaring despite herself. "What's going on here?"

Red's eyes were screwed shut, and they tensed further at the sound of Karen's voice.

"Simple examination," Ander said. "Red here told us what's going on." His hands glowed briefly, his antennae swaying like leaves in a wind. Then he nodded and patted Red's hand. "Two beings. Fused. It's fascinating, really."

"Riveting," Matt deadpanned. "You realize that one of our best friends might be dead, right?"

The Olkari who'd taken the blood sample froze. She shot a glance over her shoulder, then stuck the vial in a storage case before quietly excusing herself. Ander coughed, then smiled at Red and carefully removed the headset.

"Of course," Ander said. "Sorry for sounding insensitive. But that is what we're hoping to find out--what actually happened to Akira. We're looking for anomalies in the three basic domains--blood, brainwaves, and Quintessence signature."

"Are we done?" Red asked. They opened their eyes, but the rest of them hadn't relaxed yet, and when Ander nodded, they stood and bustled toward the door, twisting their shoulders to slip past Matt and Pidge without touching them. "I'll be at the airfield when you want to go," they muttered.

Karen watched them go, a pit in her stomach growing as silence descended in their wake. Keith looked equally perturbed, and he stared after Red for a long moment while Matt stepped forward.

"When will you know?"

Ander rubbed his chin. "Might take a few days to run every test we want to, but, paladins, if I'm being honest... None of us has ever heard of something like this happening. Even if our tests show something, that doesn't mean we're going to have any answers for you."

Matt pursed his lips. "Then what would you suggest? There aren't a lot of people out there we can go to."

"Speak with Aransha. Speak with anyone who joined the rebels in the forest." Ander placed a hand on Matt's shoulder. "They know a lot that we here in Inanimasi don't. They have a different perspective."

"We have a couple of days to waste anyway," Pidge pointed out. "Might as well give it a shot."

* * *

"Wyn? _Wyn._ "

Wyn lifted his head, blinking at Maka, who was kneeling on his chair, his hands planted in the middle of the table so he could lean across it and get in Wyn's face. Mateo, seated beside him with his legs hooked over the arm of his chair, only grinned.

"Sorry." Wyn rubbed his eyes--dry, like he'd been staring at his tablet for hours. Which he probably had been. (He definitely had been, as Rowan let him know with a light pinch.) "What was that?"

Maka rolled his eyes, dropping back into his chair with enough force to rock it back onto two legs. "I _said_ , I think we've got the encryption thing down now. You think?"

Wyn blinked a few more times, trying to get his brain to catch up with the situation. He, Maka, and Mateo had been working on a new transmitter lately--one they hoped would be able to encrypt and decrypt transmissions automatically. Wyn was interested in it. He was just... distracted.

He leaned forward, squinting at the hologram of the blueprints hovering over the table and the tablet full of notes beside it. "Uh..."

 _It's really not that difficult,_ Rowan said with a sigh. _You've built a transmitter before, and there are modules that do the encryption and decryption automatically. The only thing_ you  _need to do different is hook it up._

 _Does that mean we're good to go?_ Wyn asked, hopeful.

Rowan sighed. _Yes._

Wyn nodded. "Rowan says we're good to go."

A little spike of alarm shot through Wyn as he spoke--probably Rowan's fear more than his own, but he couldn't be sure. Neither of them were used to this yet--to being open about who they were. They'd told Maka and Mateo a few days ago, slipping it not-so-casually into a conversation late at night while they tried to figure out what to make as their next project. They'd been surprised, and a little confused, but the deeper Wyn got into his stumbling explanation, the easier it got. Before he knew it, Mateo was smiling at him, and Maka was pretending to be bored with the whole thing.

He had a lot of questions still, Wyn knew. They both did. But the questions didn't get in the way of their usual banter--and once Maka and Mateo realized that Rowan was better at remembering technical details than either of them or Wyn, he became an invaluable member of the build team.

...He would have been more invaluable still if Wyn could focus on their plans.

But as Maka and Mateo set about compiling a list of parts they would need, Wyn found his eyes drawn back to his tablet, and the short message written there.

_I don't know what's going on. I'm so confused, all the time. I don't know this place, but I think I like it better than the lab. I don't know these people, but I know I like them better than the druids. They act like they know me, when they can't possibly know me. I don't know what they want from me._

_I feel safe here, and that's the most dangerous part of all._

_Part of me thinks I'm just going crazy. This tablet only works for me, but I_ know  _I didn't write all those notes. Maybe I'm hallucinating again._

_If you’re reading this, then who are you? What do you want from me?_

_Are you even real?_

Wyn's heart ached reading Leth's words. He'd started leaving notes for them on the tablet--a suggestion he'd once read about, a long time ago when he and Rowan were just figuring out what they were. Neither of them had ever tried it, Rowan because he could just talk to everyone until Leth, Wyn because he'd never believed that there was anyone more than the two of them.

It had proved useful, though. So far. He wasn't good at talking to the others; he tended to disappear when they came out, or else he dissociated too hard to carry on a conversation. But they could talk through notes like these, and he was almost ready to call them friends... Wyrda and Talm at least. Eran was still a little prickly, and Wyn thought he might be offended if Wyn called him a friend so soon. But they were getting there. Wyn was starting to understand them all, at least.

All except Leth.

At least they were writing back now. Wyn had been leaving little notes for them for two weeks, trying to catch their attention and start a conversation. They didn't come out much, even now, so no one was sure how many of the notes they'd seen--but the first response he'd got was just yesterday, and it wasn't even directed at him. It was a journal entry, long and rambling, but Wyn and Rowan both agreed it didn't sound anything like either of them, or any of the others.

This time, Leth had gone a step further, directly acknowledging Wyn's notes. Asking about Wyn himself.

Of course, that left Wyn with the problem of trying to figure out how to tell Leth... well, _everything._  And considering how poorly Wyn himself had taken it, how long he'd been in denial about it...

He was going to have to take his time with this.

"Wyn!"

Wyn jumped, looking up to find that Maka and Mateo were both headed for the door.

 _We're going to get supplies,_  Rowan offered, and Wyn muttered his thanks as, flushing, he stood and hurried after his friends.

* * *

Mateo hadn't been back to the training deck since the castle was captured, and something about the long lines of closed doors, the steady hum of the castle's inner workings, and the silence that otherwise filled the air made it feel like too much like Keturah was in control again. He stuck close to Maka’s side as they headed for the store room, trying not to imagine gladiators gathering behind closed doors, just waiting to attack.

As though in answer to his spiraling thoughts, a muffled _crack_ split the air, instantly calling to mind a gladiator's staff striking flesh. Mateo jumped, stopping in his tracks as he spun in search of the source of the noise. His eyes went to one of the training room doors, through which he caught a flash of motion. A moment later, Edi danced into view, staff a blur. Curiously, she didn't seem to be fighting the gladiator bot like she usually did. Frowning, Mateo let Wyn and Maka continue on without him and crossed to the door, stretching taller to peer through the window.

Edi's opponent was small, but she attacked with a fury that made her momentarily unrecognizable. She held a white practice sword in her hands and hammered Edi's staff over and over until Edi found a hole in her guard and effortlessly disarmed her.

She stumbled back, wiping her face with the hem of her shirt, and Mateo saw red.

"Luz!" he roared, jabbing the door controls and storming through before it was fully open.

Luz let out an _eep_ as she spun toward him, shrinking for a moment before puffing up in indignation. "What are you doing here?"

"What are _you_ doing here?" he shot back. "Do Mom and Dad know you're doing this?"

"What, are you gonna tell on me?" She crossed her arms, doing her very best to look angry, but Mateo could see the guilt pulling at the corner of her mouth. "I'm not doing anything dangerous."

"Just learning how to _sword_ fight."

Luz's anger cooled at that, and she deflated into a sulk. "Yeah, cause getting captured with no self defense training at all was _such_ a great plan for all of us."

As quickly as Mateo's anger had flared, it sputtered out, and he dropped his arms to his side, taking a second look at his sister. She was guilty, yes, and angry, and indignant, but underneath it all she was _scared_ , blinking furiously and gritting her teeth to keep it from showing. They'd all been unprepared for Keturah's attack, but no one more than Luz--and considering _she_ was the one Keturah had decided to pick on... Mateo couldn't really blame her for wanting to learn how to fight.

Edi gathered up Luz's discarded sword, storing it with the other training weapons in a rack that descended from the ceiling. She stepped back as the rack retracted, silently blocking Wyn and Maka, who were pressing at the door, trying to figure out what had distracted Mateo.

He ignored them all, crossing to Luz and pulling her into a hug. "Hey," he said, squeezing tighter as she shoved against him. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize..."

She shoved him one more time, the heel of her hand digging in just below his ribs, then gave up the fight with a huff. "Course you didn't. You were too busy getting mad."

He winced, but she wasn't wrong. "Sorry," he said again. "I just want you to be safe."

"I'll be safer if I know how to protect myself," she grumbled. " _This_ is why I didn't tell anyone, you know."

"Yeah. If Mom and Dad knew you were doing this..." He whistled. "It would _not_ be pretty."

She shoved him again, so suddenly she managed to break out of his hug. "I get it, okay? You don't need to blackmail me. I'll stop."

She wouldn't. She'd make a big show of it, then start up again on her own, somewhere no one would walk in on her--that was what she'd done when their dad made her promise to stop stealing Mateo's toys after she'd broken two action figures and a miniature airplane in her "stunt shows." She would apologize if forced into it, and then she would just make extra sure not to get caught.

Fortunately, Mateo had no intention of making her practice with swords in some dark, dusty, unused room where she'd probably end up bleeding out because there was no one around to help.

He grabbed her arm as she stormed away, cringing only a little at the glare she shot his way. "Wait. You don't need to stop. I'm not going to tell Mom and Dad."

She squinted at him, looking for the loophole. "What about Lance?"

"Won't tell him either."

She squinted some more, her eyes so narrow Mateo wasn't sure they were actually still open. "Val? Tia Lena? The princess?"

"Nope." Mateo held up a hand. "I won't tell anyone, I promise. _No one's_ gonna tell _anyone_ , _right?_ " He shot a pointed look over his shoulder at Wyn and Maka.

"We won't tell," Wyn said, holding up his hands. He paused, then elbowed Maka, who grunted, glared, and finally threw his head back with a groan.

"Of course I'm not gonna tell. Why would _I_ tell on _your_ sister? Why would I tell on anyone? If she wants to put herself through this, I'm not gonna stick my nose in."

Luz stared hard at him, clearly not trusting him. (Mateo couldn't blame her; Maka wasn't exactly making an effort to sound trustworthy here. Mostly, he just sounded bored and irritated.) "What's the catch?"

Mateo rolled his eyes. "I'm not trying to trick you, Luz. If you want to learn to fight, then... That's probably a good idea. We're not going out into battle, but I don't think anyone can say that we're _safe._ Not after everything that happened. If anything, Mom and Dad should be the ones _asking_ for some kind of training for us."

Luz shifted her weight to the side, propping her free hand on her hip. "Are you saying _you_ want to train with me now?"

" _Me?_ " Mateo laughed, but he quickly trailed off. "Actually...? I'm not sure that I really want to, but it might be smart. Just in case, you know?"

A smile had appeared on Luz's face, small and smug. "I'll bet I can kick your butt."

If she'd been training for long, she probably could, but Mateo wasn't about to admit it. He straightened up, trying to look confident. "No way you can. You're too scrawny."

Before he could say anything more, she'd dropped low, kicking Mateo's feet out from under him. He toppled, yelping, and she popped up again with a grin. "This is gonna be fun."

* * *

Aransha was the first to greet the paladins when they landed deep in the forest. Pidge dragged their feet as they followed their family out of the lion--but Red dragged their feet even more. They'd been moody and standoffish ever since leaving Inanimasi, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cockpit for the duration of the short flight.

Aransha greeted Karen in a low tone, gripping her arm before turning to give Keith and Matt a similar welcome. Her expression softened when she caught sight of Pidge, and for a moment Pidge seriously considered turning around and marching right back up into the cockpit.

But Aransha was faster, crossing to Pidge's side and studying them for a moment before pulling them into a hug. "Pidge. You look well."

Pidge couldn't resist the urge to snort at that, though they caught sight of their mother's frown and quickly turned it into a cough. "I'm doing... better." They hesitated. "How have you been?"

She pulled back, patted Pidge's shoulder one last time, and smiled. "Healing. That is as much as any of us can hope for, don't you think? Time may not erase the pain, but it can ease it--close friends and family even more."

Pidge thought of Val, weathering the worst of their emotional storms; of Keith, offering silent companionship on lonely nights; of Matt and their mother's steady presence and endless patience. Looking into Aransha's eyes, they knew she'd found the same in her friends and family here in the cell. Healing. Just as with Pidge's dislocated ankle, it was a slow process. The pain and the shakiness remained. But it was better now than that first day, when they'd hardly been able to keep hold of their mind, when the pain of being inside Green had rendered them nearly catatonic.

They smiled back at Aransha, tentative, and lifted one shoulder. "You're right."

"I don't know if anyone called ahead," Matt said, clearly anxious to get on to their real reason for visiting. Aransha turned toward him, and her raised eyebrows made it clear she hadn't heard anything. "We were hoping for your help."

"Oh?" Aransha cocked her head, but before Matt could explain, she'd turned, her gaze zeroing in on something over Pidge's shoulder. They turned to see that Red had finally emerged, though they'd stopped, toeing the edge of the ramp and glaring at the dirt ahead as though it had personally offended them. Aransha breathed out, every inch of her seeming to lengthen as she swept forward. "I see."

Red's head snapped up, a snarl pulling at their lips, and Aransha stopped short.

She held up her hands. "What happened?"

Red said nothing, and Matt looked like he was about to say something they were all going to regret, so Pidge stepped in, following Aransha to where she had stopped hardly five feet from Red. "It's a long story. Short version? Red was dying, so Akira and a few others went to Oriande to try to find a way to help her." They paused, indicating Red with a gesture. "They found it. But it... wasn't exactly what any of us were expecting."

Aransha hummed. "Yes. Your Quintessence..."

"What about it?" Red asked, prickly as ever.

"It's... smudged." Aransha frowned. "Vivasi gets this way sometimes. When the Quintessence of one creature mixes with that of another--one of our people using the Arts on a tree, for example. When a symbiotic relationship develops between two creatures. Or a parasitic one."

Red's lips pressed thin, and Pidge thought that maybe indirectly calling them a parasite wasn't the most tactful way to approach this conversation.

Matt, though, didn't seem to care. "Is there a way to undo it?"

Aransha didn't turn, so Matt probably didn't see the way her lips turned down at his question. Pidge, standing beside her, did, and their own brow furrowed in confusion.

Aransha was quiet for a long moment, watching Red. Then, at length, she turned to the rest of the group. "I can't answer that question at this point. Give me some time to speak with them, and we'll go from there."

Matt started forward, but Aransha held up her hand.

"In private, please." Matt didn't like that, but Aransha was once more focused on Red. "We won't be long. Make yourselves at home. I'm sure anyone would be happy to show you around, if you'd like to get something to eat, or if you plan to spend the night and would like to find somewhere to stay." She paused, weighing her next words as she regarded Pidge. "Or there's the Grove. Ryner's Legacy has recently begun to express itself."

Pidge's breath caught, and Aransha offered a sympathetic smile, but then she was gone, ushering Red away from the lion and sweet-talking them in a calm, soothing voice that nonetheless steamrolled right over Red's attempts at a protest.

Karen was at Pidge's side in an instant, hovering in that way that said she was worried about them, and about what Aransha's mention of Ryner might have done to them. They tried to gather their composure, tried to be brusque and unshaken when they brushed her off, but they knew they failed, and failed miserably. Keith and Matt drifted over, and Pidge took off at a march before their concern had a chance to become stifling.

"The Grove is this way," they said, hoping that if they skipped over all the emotional bits, their family would do the same. Because, yes, the mention of Ryner had stirred up that old pain, and yes, they were afraid that if they thought about it too much for too long, they were going to start choking up.

At the same time, though, they weren't going to hide from this. They didn't want to. They weren't sure if it was closure they were after, or if they only felt they owed it to Ryner, but as much as it hurt to think about visiting her grave in the Legacy Grove, the idea of not going, of not even giving her that much respect, turned their stomach.

They'd planted Ryner's seed, after all. They'd helped it grow. It was only right that they be there to see what it had made.

The Grove was quiet today--even quieter than usual. Ryner was the most recent loss to be enshrined here, and though several of the other trees bore gifts in testament to recent visitors--flowers strung in the branches, wooden toys and machines at the base of the trunk, folded notes that hadn't yet been ruined by rain or dew--there was no one else to keep them company as Pidge followed one of the interlacing paths toward the hill near the back of the Grove where Ryner rested.

They were amazed they remembered the way at all; they'd been dazed and distracted when they'd come for the burial, and nothing about that visit was clear in their memories. But the path may as well have been etched into their soul, and their feet carried them to Ryner's grave without a flicker of hesitation.

Then, there it was. A delicate silver tree, twice as tall as it had been when Pidge last saw it, with a lush halo of emerald leaves almost too green to be real. The bark shimmered in the afternoon light, and the leaves shone like gemstones, and for a moment the rest of the forest fell away. The tree exuded quiet and calm, a sensation of comfort and understanding that Pidge could only associate with Ryner. They slowed, eyes watering, and tried not to let the emotion leak into their breath. The others had stopped around them, and someone placed a comforting hand on Pidge's back, and maybe they hadn't meant for it to propel them forward, but it did anyway.

They climbed the low rise, their breath suspended on a wire, and stopped in the verdant shadows of the canopy, breathing in the scent of cool earth and warm metal.

Cautious, they reached out to run their hand along the trunk. Their fingertips had hardly brushed the cool, smooth surface before the leaves began to glow from within and heat rose to the surface of the trunk and something soft and familiar reached out to Pidge's mind with a silent question.

_Who are you?_

* * *

The archives were quiet and somber, and not just because of the carnage playing out silently on every screen.

The paladins had been called to battle. Eli thought he'd accepted that fact of life by now, but somehow when Hunk, Shay, and Meri's comms lit up with an alert, it still felt like a hand clamping down on his heart.

"How bad?" Lana had asked, setting her tablet aside and launching to her feet before the paladins could move more than two steps from their seats.

Meri and Shay glanced at Hunk, who waved them on before crossing to Lana and pulling her into a hug. "Distress call from an occupied world," he said. "Hard to say how bad it is until we're there, but doesn't sound anywhere close to the worse we've had recently."

By that, of course, he meant that there was no sign of Dark Voltron, no suggestion that the Vkullor was going to show its face. It was sad that _that_ had become the measure of danger, and anything less than mind-controlled loved ones or a literally unkillable space-cryptid was cause for relief.

But Lana did relax, giving Hunk one last squeeze before releasing him. "Be careful anyway," she said. "Call when you're done."

 _Call when you're done_ , like this was just a test back at the Garrison--no real risks involved, no chance that someone would die today. It messed with Eli's head sometimes, how desensitized they'd all become. It wasn't that long ago that Lana and Akani were trying to keep Hunk out of this war altogether, and he'd had to threaten to cut ties on his eighteenth birthday and leave anyway just to get them to relent.

Now look at them.

They'd settled back into a semblance of focus in the twenty minutes since, Lana and Akani huddled together over the same screen, whispering back and forth; Coran deeply focused on his own tablet, a holographic keyboard and screen up beside him so he could take notes. Of the four of them, only Coran was listening to the files' audio--Eli found it distracting at best, and Akani was outright disturbed by what was all too often panicked screams and the wailing of people watching their home planet be torn apart.

Eli had volunteered to help review the footage mostly because it was something he _could_ do, and because his experience with video editing could only help him. So far he'd mostly been trying to find clean images to take screencaptures of--images that showed scars and fresh wounds on the Vkullor, images that showed the beast in the middle of an attack, images that showed where attacks had landed, with notes on the type of attack and the Vkullor's response. He wasn't finding any answers himself, not yet, but the hope was that once he compiled each of these images, compared them, he would start to see trends.

Places where you never saw scars could be investigated as potential vital points. The mechanism of the Vkullor's most deadly attack might be picked apart. Maybe they could even find a type of weapon or a target for attack that seemed to scare the creatures off.

Any of it could be useful, and staring at these little details was easier than watching the attacks unfold in real time. So Eli pressed on, taking screencaps and annotating them as he added them to his bloated files for later review.

"Do you think we're really going to find anything in here?" Akani asked.

Eli looked up at her, keeping his mouth shut against the impulse to voice his simmering pessimism, throw down his tablet, and leave in search of something less nauseating to fill his time. Akani looked like she was fighting not to cry, and Lana took her hand, squeezing in reassurance.

"We will," she said. "We have to."

Akani puckered her lips and glanced down at Lana briefly before averting her eyes. "Coran? You have more experience with this sort of thing than any of us. Be honest. Do you think studying these videos is helping, or are we just doing it so we don't have to admit that it's hopeless?"

Coran stared back at her, quiet and contemplative. Eli appreciated that he didn't try to dodge the question or smooth it over with empty reassurances. His brow furrowed, and he set his tablet and headphones aside before leaning forward and folding his hands between his knees.

"I wish I could tell you that we were sure to find something. I do. I certainly hope we will, and I think for now it's the best lead we have. We need information, and unless the others find something on Olkarion, these recordings contain the sum total of all the knowledge we have of Vkullor. I have to hold onto the hope that we'll find something in here somewhere."

Akani wavered, dropping her gaze to the floor, and Eli leaned toward her like he could reach across the distance between them without leaving his chair.

"I don't know how long I can do this," she admitted.

Coran stood, crossing to where she stood and taking her hand in his. "You don't _need_ to do this. Not for a single second longer than you're able. That's the point of splitting the work up."

Eli could see Akani rebelling against Coran's words. Eli would never call her delicate, but she was empathetic to a fault, and she'd never been able to stomach most of Eli's videos--not the ones that showed storms and riots and the aftermath of fires and car accidents. This must have been next to torture for her.

But as sensitive as she was to the suffering of others, she was even more stubborn, and loyal to a fault. She wouldn't leave the task to anyone else. She'd rather suffer through it.

Eli stood before she could dig herself too deep into this pit of self-sacrifice. "How about a break?" he asked. "Step away from this for a few minutes?"

Akani hesitated, but it was only a matter of moments before she caved, nodding her thanks to Eli before heading for the door. Lana started to leverage herself out of her chair, but stopped as Eli turned toward her.

"You're welcome to join us," he said, pinning his sister with a stare that he hoped communicated that he wanted a few minutes alone with Akani. "The both of you, if you need the break. We're just going to clear our heads. Maybe do a little baking."

"Bring us back whatever goodies you turn out and we'll call it even." Lana flashed a slightly strained smile, and Eli patted her on the shoulder as he headed out. She was feeling the strain too; he knew she was. He suspected it was by only focusing on the data that she had held on this long, and he didn't doubt that she would need a break of her own before the day was out.

But that was a problem for later, and right now, Eli was more concerned with Akani.

She was, as he'd expected, already setting up shop in the kitchen by the time he caught up with her. She was a lot like Hunk that way; when she was stressed, she needed to do something with her hands, and that usually meant baking. Eli couldn't have been more than two minutes behind her, but she already had a dozen different jars and canisters out, a batter mixing up in a large bowl while she sliced some alien fruit Eli didn't know the name of and tossed the pieces into a saucepan.

"Hey," he said, joining her behind the counter. "Need help?"

She pressed the knife into his hand without a word, leaving him to finish preparing the fruit while she went to check on the batter. He let her work in silence for a while, trying to guess what it was she was making. He would have said cakes, or maybe cupcakes, but his kitchen expertise lagged far behind Hunk or Akani's, and he honestly didn't even recognize the name of what they were baking at least one time out of three.

This time, though, he seemed to be spot on with his guess. Akani finished with the batter and scooped it into the liners she'd filled into a pair of cupcake trays. Once she had the trays in the oven, she floundered a bit, glancing nervously at Eli before bustling in to take over with the fruit once more.

Five minutes after that, she was left without a distraction to hold up as a shield, though she made a valiant effort to focus on the simmering syrupy fruit mixture she had cooking on the stove.

"I don't know how you do it," she said at length, turning off the burner and lifting the pan away from the residual heat.

"Do what?" he asked.

Akani gestured vaguely at the air around her as she set down the pan full of... Eli was pretty sure she'd called it compote. "Those videos we've been watching. I know Coran thinks it will help, but it just makes me sick. I can't stop thinking about how many people that thing has already killed."

"I don't blame you," Eli said, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed. "Honestly, I've just tricked myself into not thinking about that. If I focus on the little details and not the context, it's not so bad."

Akani stared at him, and he squirmed.

"I'm not saying it's _not_ bad. Just more tolerable." He sighed as she turned back to her project, opening and shutting cabinets with a series of bangs, heedless of the noise. "Coran was right, though. You don't need to do this."

That was the wrong thing to say, it seemed. Akani shut one last cabinet with a bang so loud it made Eli jump. She shot him a sidelong glare, but quickly turned away, glaring instead at the wall, her hand lingering on the door she'd just closed. Eli stared at her, then stared at the floor, his mouth running dry.

"I'm not running away."

Eli frowned, but didn't lift his gaze. "No one said anything about that."

"Hunk and Shay were out there, you know. Right in the middle of it. They didn't get the choice to look away and pretend no one was dying."

"I know." Eli looked up, searching her posture for some sign of what she wanted from him. "Don't you think that might be part of the problem?"

She turned, a grunt of protest escaping her.

"You had to have felt it. Right?" He paused, waiting for a sign from Akani that she knew what he was talking about. He wouldn't lie; he'd thought himself crazy. Still did, when he let himself stop and think about it. Was there really anything strange about empathizing with your nephew and his partner when they were bearing the weight that the paladins had to bear? Was there anything strange about feeling a little of that same weight in your own shoulders, a little of that strain in your bones?

He couldn't help thinking there _was_ , particularly when you were adjunct to the Yellow Lion. She'd promised them endurance, and asked them to share her paladins' burdens. In light of that, didn't the strain seem a bit too close, a bit too personal? This wasn't an empathetic strain in the usual sense. It was empathy in a much grander sense--not quite Coran's empathy, but something like it.

He continued watching Akani, gaze steady, holding his tongue until she looked up and at last met his eye.

"They need us more than they're letting on, don't they?"

Eli smiled, sad and somber, but he nodded--because Akani was right. He didn't know what his nephew was doing right now, what he needed, the way Karen would have. He couldn't feel Hunk's emotions and put a name to them, as Coran did. The strain was a nameless, faceless thing, all-consuming and omnipresent. What Eli was feeling was the aftershocks. The exhaustion, physical and emotional, that came after a storm that had passed them all by.

Akani's timer rang, and Eli found an oven mitt to toss her. "Let's finish this up," he said. "We can't do anything till they're back from this mission, anyway."

She smiled, something wry and knowing lurking behind the expression. "Greet them with sugar before digging into the muck?"

"Something like that."

She nodded, and plucked the trays from the oven with more determination in her movements than she'd shown for the last four hours.

* * *

"You're uncomfortable."

Red lifted their head, eyes narrowing as they studied Aransha, seemingly searching for a trap. They wore that same wary aura with which they'd informed her that she could continue to use Akira's pronouns. It felt like a test, and it reeked of resignation, but she could get no more out of them on the matter.

"What are you talking about?" Red asked, not a little sullen. "I'm fine."

Tense as a new recruit before their first battle and jumping at every movement--but of course. They were fine.

She supposed that was why they'd entered the medical tent like a prisoner stepping up to the executioner's block.

"All right," she said, deciding not to push. Not yet, at any rate. She could hardly expect Red to trust her less than an hour after they'd met. "Tell me what happened?"

Red had long since claimed the bed at the center of this tent, lounging on it like they were on vacation and not in the middle of a medical checkup. (A rudimentary one, admittedly. They'd gotten a small hospital up and running since driving the Galra off their planet, but routine examinations--even not-so-routine ones like this--mostly happened in tents or homes for privacy, while anything more complicated had to wait until time could be scheduled at the hospital.)

To be perfectly frank, Aransha was glad for the simple accommodations. Red was tense, but they'd relaxed fractionally since settling into this tent. Aransha suspected the crisp and clean lines of the hospital would have been the opposite of helpful.

"What is there to tell?" Red asked, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "Keturah tried to kill me, and my lion decided the only way to keep Keturah out of our paladins' heads was to smash her own crystal. So, really, we were dying from both ends. Only way to salvage Voltron was for me to merge with Akira here. He volunteered," they added, narrowing their eyes like they expected Aransha to insinuate otherwise.

She only nodded, resting her hand on the tablet in her lap so she could impart a few notes. Interesting, the way Red referred to themself as though the spirit from Oriande and the lion from the Castle were two different beings.

"That was very brave of him," she noted, careful not to put too much emotion into her voice. Her gaze remained steady on Red, noting the way their hands tightened their grip on the edge of the bed, the way they closed their eyes for a brief moment. "Forgive me for asking, but I've never seen anything like this. What do you mean when you say you merged with Akira?"

Red shrugged again. "I entered him. My physical form was too badly damaged, so I shed it and took on this one. I had already woven a piece of my soul into his through the lion, so our Quintessence was able to intermingle without issue."

Aransha frowned. "May I?" she asked, holding out both hands, palms up. Red regarded them with suspicion, so Aransha elaborated. "I can sense the currents of your Quintessence only in the most general sense. If you will allow me to take a closer look, I may better understand what it is happened when you two merged."

Reluctantly, Red accepted, placing their hands into hers and then proceeding to sit stock-still as Aransha let her awareness suffuse Red's Quintessence network.

Almost at once, she noticed irregularities in the flow.

"You said your Quintessence was able to intermingle without issue," she said carefully. "Are you certain you haven't noticed anything odd?"

Red went rigid, snatching their hands back from Aransha. "Nothing," they said, and crossed their arms over their chest.

Aransha retreated, adding a few more observations to her notes with a brush of her fingers. "That's good to hear. It does seem as though the Quintessence itself is compatible. Although I did notice some... blockages."

"I'm still settling into the body," they said, staring now at the far wall of the tent. "Give me a break. I don't know what to do with half the parts here."

It was more than that. _Deeper_ than that. Aransha didn’t need the Arts to know that Red had walls up, but those walls were interfering with the flow of their Quintessence. Aransha had seen it before, or something like it. She’d seen the aftereffects of war, the emotional carnage that came from watching friends die, from facing your _own_ death.

Aransha claimed a seat across from Red and leaned forward, clasping her hands before her. "You've been through something terrible. I worry that you haven't let yourself come to terms with it."

"Maybe I haven't." Red turned at last to look at Aransha directly, and the reflective layer coating their retina flashed an eerie red. "Maybe I didn't realize what it would do, to bring both pieces of me together inside a human host. Maybe it was all a little more than I was anticipating, and _maybe_ there just isn't time for me to meditate on the horrors of the universe when I only did any of this so I could keep fighting."

Aransha resisted the urge to take Red's hand, though it seemed to her they were very much in need of the comfort. "You don't need to do this to yourself. None of the paladins want that. Even when they only knew you as the Red Lion, they knew you weren't just a machine. Take some time for yourself. Find closure. _Heal_. You deserve that much. Keith and Matt would agree."

Red laughed at that--actually laughed. "It would be nice if the universe were that kind. But I don't have the luxury of confronting my demons. The paladins need me ready for battle. This is the best way to do that."

For a long moment, Aransha said nothing, only stared at Red, contemplating. There was more to it than that. Aransha was no psychologist, but she was the leader of a former rebel cell. While Ryner had managed their defenses and devised many of their strategies, Aransha had seen to their people. She knew what it looked like when people played into expectations as a means of deflection.

Red was still hiding something.

“You speak as though you are only the kotha spirit from Oriande,” she said slowly. “How much of the Red Lion is there in you? How much of Akira?”

Red froze, wide eyes staring at her like she'd just accused them of war crimes. “I can’t give him back to them,” they said stiffly. “I’m sure that’s what they asked you to get me to do, but it’s impossible.”

“The paladins have asked nothing of me,” Aransha said levelly. “Is getting Akira back something _you_ want?”

"I don't owe him anything," they snapped, the crack of a whip in their tone, a flashpoint of emotion overwhelming their stoic mask for the briefest of moments. They recovered quickly, took a breath, and smiled again. "Akira made his choice. He knew what was at stake, and he saw that his options were to surrender himself or to lose everyone he cared about. I don’t know how much of him is still holding on, and frankly, I can’t afford to care."

They fell silent, pulling one foot up onto the bed and looping an arm around it.

"I only need to hang on long enough to stop Keturah. After that, Akira--if there is an Akira anymore--can have his damn body back."

Aransha frowned. “So you’re just going to die, once the war is over?”

“I’m already dead,” Red said, spreading their arms wide. “Keturah killed me once, and I killed myself a second time. All Akira did was let me cheat the system for a little while.” They dropped their chin onto their knee and stared, unseeing, at the pattern painted onto the side of the tent. “Neither of us were thinking past the end of the war, okay? So... I don’t know what’s going to happen. But it’s better for everyone if no one gets their hopes up. Okay? Do whatever you need to do, but don’t promise my paladins anything you can’t guarantee. They deserve better than a false hope.”

* * *

_Who are you?_

Pidge snatched their hand back with a cry, heart leaping into their throat. The voice echoed in their ears--not a voice, but a question. Not a presence, but an expectation. They were almost certain their own mind had put the words to the question, and even though they'd broken contact with the tree, the expectation still gnawed at their mind, more words rising to fill the gap.

_Identify._

_Please enter your username._

_What's your name?_

_Hello?_

Each spoke with Ryner's voice.

"Pidge?"

Pidge jumped as someone touched their back, and they spun to find their mother frowning at them, Keith and Matt no less concerned but marginally more distant.

"You okay?" Karen asked. "What happened?"

Pidge looked back to the tree. "I don't know. It's definitely working. Just... surprised me. Let me try again."

They approached the tree once more, and pressed their hand to the bark before they could second guess themself. The questioning impulse came again, but now that they knew what they were expecting, it was easier to see the full picture. There was no voice talking to them. There was no presence inside the tree. And though it felt almost like Ryner reaching out to them through the bond, they could see, now that they were looking, that it was just an echo of her Quintessence replicated by the tree. Familiar, but no more so than the memories that still occasionally cropped up to haunt Pidge's stray thoughts.

The prompt to identify themself came again--and it felt more like a prompt than a question, more like a computer than a person. They could almost see the cursor flashing, waiting for their input.

 _Pidge,_ they thought, but the tree didn't respond. Frowning, they tried again, sending their name to the tree the way they might send a thought through the bond to Green or to Val. Sharp focus, clear intent, holding the shape of the word in their mind.

It didn't work.

Pidge suddenly felt stupid, and they darted a glance to the side to see if anyone had noticed what was happening. They mostly seemed confused, waiting for Pidge to say something.

They sat back on their heels, then pushed themself to their feet. "I need a headset." They turned at once and set off down the path, back toward the village.

Keith followed on their heels, his head cocked to the side. "What for?"

"Ryner's legacy," they said. "It's a machine--sort of. An Olkari machine. You need the Arts to interface with it. Ryner taught me how to do this sort of thing, but I'm not Olkari; I need one of their headsets to amplify my commands. Um." They stopped short as an Olkari woman who'd been sitting on a bench at the entrance to the Grove stood, moving to intercept them. "Hi?"

The Olkari inclined her head. "Hi." She paused, seeming to realize that Pidge had no clue who she was. "Joska. I helped take back Inanimasi."

Pidge would just have to take her word on that. "Were you waiting for us?"

"Aransha sent me," Joska explained. She reached into the bag hanging off her shoulder and produced a headset. "She said you might need this. I didn't want to intrude."

Pidge took the headset hesitantly, staring at it. There was no reason for them to feel like it was a bomb waiting to go off--least of all when they'd been on their way to find exactly this. They supposed they'd been counting on the walk to town and back to clear their head and settle their nerves. "Oh. Thanks."

Joska squeezed their shoulder, dropping her hand before the touch could grow too uncomfortable. "I miss her, too. But this will help."

Pidge gave her a skeptical look, and she laughed softly.

"It might at least help answer some of your questions. Go on. I'll make sure there's food ready for you when you're done."

She lifted her gaze, smiling at the rest of Pidge's family and lifting her hand in a wave before she turned to go. Pidge lingered there a moment, fingers curling around the headset. Then, steeling themself, they turned and marched back to Ryner's tree, where they settled the headset over their hair, closed their eyes, and reached out once more for the tree.

_Authentication._

With the headset, Pidge could see the interface even more clearly--clean, minimalist lines and clear blue letters scrolling by as Ryner's organic computer worked.

 _Pidge._ They didn't think their name, but transmitted it directly through their Quintessence, a burst of information like computer code and biological signaling all in one. It was a command like one they might give to the pods growing in other groves here in Vivasi, waiting only to be activated.

The tree's Quintessence pulsed slowly, bringing to mind the spinning of a cursor or an indicator on a loading web page. Within seconds, acknowledgment rippled out.

_Profile initialized. Welcome. Please enter your query._

Query? Pidge frowned. They'd been expecting Ryner's legacy to do something--or, if they were being honest, they'd been hoping for a message. Everything had been so rushed at the end, a frantic blur of pain and heat. There had been no time for goodbyes, much less anything else, and they'd thought maybe...

_What is this?_

A stream of information hit them, too quickly to be filtered through words.

"It's an archive," they said, a little breathless. "Ryner left an archive."

"Of what?"

Pidge shook their head. "Everything. As much as she could think to include, and..." They smiled, reaching up to pluck a deep green berry from a low-hanging branch. "It's a living archive. Wherever the seeds are scattered, another tree with grow, all of them connected. Anyone who uses them can add onto the Archives, and anyone can access the information they contain."

They paused, a sudden thought occurring to them.

_Can I take this with me? Plant it in Ryner's garden on the castle-ship?_

The archive returned an affirmative almost at once, though Pidge got the impression it would take more time to get a response the further their access point was from the original tree here in the Legacy Grove. The same Quintessence powered both, and they would resonate with each other across the universe--Ryner must have taken inspiration from Val's research on that point--but it wouldn't be an instantaneous thing.

That was okay. Pidge closed their hand around the seed, smiling as they did so. It was a little bittersweet, carrying a link to Ryner's wisdom in their pocket, but it soothed a hole they hadn't realized had been there.

They wanted to talk to her. Just once more. Just for a moment.

They supposed this was as close as they were going to get.

 _Thank you,_ they thought, delivering the sentiment to the tree, though they knew there was no point.

_You're welcome. Enter another query?_

Pidge sank deeper into the archives, letting the imaginary UI fade into the background. This system didn't need it, any more than it needed a keyboard or a printer. They requested information on the Vkullor, but the archives contained nothing Pidge didn't already know--just a general idea of what had happened to Daibazaal ten thousand years ago. That wasn't surprising; none of them had known much of anything about Vkullor until the last few months. None of them had needed to. Ryner probably had never even heard of the creatures outside the context of the egg and what it represented.

They tried again, searching for information that might help them--information on Dark Voltron, on the master key device. Things Ryner had known about, and had been actively looking into. Maybe she'd made a breakthrough near the end and simply hadn't had a chance to pass it on to Pidge.

If she had, that knowledge hadn't made it into the archives. Trying not to feel discouraged, Pidge tried one last thing, compacting the idea that was Red and Akira and everything that had happened on Oriande into a single burst of data, just to see what the archives returned.

It wasn't much. Some insights into Quintessence Pidge would have to mull over later. Some symbiotes found deep in Vivasi that fused their Quintessence. Pidge supposed that was _sort of_ the same thing, but they didn't see how it would help them get Akira back.

The stream of information continued for a few moments, too quick for Pidge to consciously process everything the archive presented to them. It was like skimming down a list of search results, hardly seeing most of them. Every so often, their eye would catch on something, dragging it to the forefront for them to mull over. The rest was dismissed as irrelevant or filed away for later. It was a strange sensation, to be sure, and it left Pidge feeling as though they should have feel more off kilter than they were. Part of them had to wonder whether they were missing things, letting their subconscious process it all.

The rest of them knew better than to worry.

It felt as though it couldn't have been more than five or ten minutes before they sat back, only now realizing that they'd actually _sat down_ at some point. They were cross-legged on the new grass covering Ryner's grave, and their hand dropped into their lap as they pulled it away from the tree.

Keith lay nearby, his hands folded beneath his head, his eyes staring vacantly at the wispy clouds drifting by overhead. He turned toward Pidge, ears swiveling. "Learn anything?"

"Yes and no..." They scrubbed their eyes, which were crusty and dry like they'd been staring at a computer screen all day, and blinked against the light--reddish light, and dim, like... "What time is it?"

Keith let his head roll to follow Pidge as they twisted at the waist to scan the Grove. Shadows gathered between the trees, and neither Matt nor Karen was anywhere to be found.

"It's been a couple of hours now."

" _Hours?_ " Pidge screeched.

Keith flicked his ear. "We tried getting your attention, but you seemed pretty..." He trailed off with a vague flick of his hand. "It wasn't like we're in a big rush or anything, so we didn't want to _drag_ you out of there and risk hurting your or something. So Matt and your mom went to get some food. I volunteered to stay in case you woke up, which you did. They should be back soon."

He was so laid back about it all it was hard to stay alarmed. They'd made it halfway to their feet while he was talking, off-balance and clinging to Ryner's tree in an attempt to haul themself upright--or maybe just to keep from toppling over. Slowly, they lowered themself back to the ground, cross-legged once more, staring at Keith in consternation.

"I didn't realize it was taking so long," they grumbled, more irritated at themself than at Keith but unable to keep the bite out of their words.

Keith, fortunately, didn't seem bothered. "Yeah, we kinda figured," he said. "Your mom said there was nothing to worry about, but Matt was getting antsy. I think they went mostly so Matt didn't spiral out of control." He paused. "What did you learn?"

"Quite a bit, I think, but I don't know how much of it is actually useful." Pidge turned their head to look back at the tree. It still didn't look like much--shiny and streamlined in a way Pidge found more appealing than most greenery, but not all that _impressive_ compared to some of what they'd seen in Vivasi. "I guess Ryner would've been just as lost as the rest of us if she were still around."

Keith squirmed in place, apparently unsure how to respond to that. (Which was fair. Pidge didn't know why they'd said it, or what they'd expected from Keith in return. It felt better to talk about her, though. It felt right.)

"So the all that's in the archives right now is what Ryner knew?" he said. "Until people start adding to it or--"

Pidge thrust their hand out, pressing a finger to his lips. (More to his cheek. With him sprawled on the ground like that aiming was a little awkward.) "Wait."

Keith's lips pursed against Pidge's finger. "Wait, what?"

Pidge ignored him, launching themself at Ryner's tree once more and splaying their fingers across the cool bark. They didn't wait for the identification prompt, and they didn't bother responding with anything approaching coherency, just fired a raw, unfocused burst of thought, emotion, and impulse at the archive.

That apparently was authentication enough, and they felt their profile unfold. Their scalp tingled, the background processes of their mind tangling with the mechanism of the archives. It was a learning system--not an AI, but _better_. It would adapt to Pidge's thought patterns, learn to hone the results according to Pidge's intentions, and save an impression of past searches in case they needed to find particular bits of information again.

They knew all this without having to be told, the same way they knew that they didn't need to try to put their next question into words, that just thinking of the inscrutable metal seed Ryner had left behind with her legacy seed would be enough to find the answers they'd been looking for.

A seed, almost identical to the one Pidge had helped plant, which had grown into this tree and founded the fledgling archives. Maybe that had been intentional. Maybe Ryner had been trying to point them back here, to the only way Pidge had to ask her what it was she'd left them.

The answer blossomed in their mind, a slow unfurling of knowledge that felt as though it had been there all along, just waiting for a light to shine its way. Pidge's hand fell away from the tree just as Matt and Karen returned to the Grove, where Keith had sat to attention, his ears cocked and his eyes darting this way and that as he searched Pidge for an explanation.

They only shook their head, pulled off their headset, and offered their mother a weak smile. She offered a bowl of the granola-like mixture that was such a staple to Ryner's cell, but Pidge only shook their head.

"Have we figured out where we're staying tonight?" they asked.

"Aransha found a place for us," Karen said. "Why? Is everything all right?"

"Sure. I'm just tired. Have a lot to think about." They smiled what they hoped was a reassuring smile, then headed down the trail toward the main encampment. Their family got the hint soon enough and joined them, silent as they made their way across town to the building where they were to stay.

Pidge left their family outside and headed in, stopping in the doorway to the back rooms at the sight of Red, listless on the edge of a bed, their hands dangling loose between their knees. Their head shot up at Pidge's entrance, and they stiffened.

"Sorry," Pidge said, holding up their hands. "Didn't realize you were in here." They paused. "Everything okay?"

"Fine," Red said. They quickly lay down and pulled the blanket up over their shoulder as they rolled toward the wall, effectively putting an end to the non-conversation.

Pidge backed out of the room. "Okay. I'm not much in the mood to talk, either." They retreated into the hallway and turned for one of the other bedroom doors--there were three of them, and Pidge was sure it was Red who would end up without a roommate. It struck them as sad, suddenly, and they glanced back into the room. Red hadn't moved, but their shoulder was hitched too high to mistake their posture as relaxed.

"Goodnight, Red," they called. "And... thanks for coming along. I think Matt and Keith needed the reminder that you care about Akira as much as the rest of us. That you want to save him, too."

"I _want_ to get some sleep," they said, voice carrying easily even though they were practically talking into their pillow.

Pidge only smiled and pulled the door closed. "Right. Sleep well."

* * *

They returned to the castle-ship the next day. Aransha had apparently met with Matt, Keith, and Karen that night to go over the results of her examination of Red. Not that there was much to report. She would look into it, see if anyone in the forest had ever seen anything like it, but all she could tell them was that Akira's Quintessence, so far, was still distinguishable from Red’s, though vastly overshadowed.

Matt and Keith took that as good news, and Pidge had to admit it made them a little more optimistic, too. If Red and Akira were still distinct in one regard, maybe that was true of other things, too.

They made a quick stop back in Inanimasi to meet with Ander and the other researchers. Samso and Argi had joined the hunt overnight, but the preliminary findings were lackluster, to put it mildly. They found references to one poison and two infections thought to have afflicted Vkullor, but none of them had been mentioned in writings for five thousand years. If any of them still existed, the Olkari couldn't help find them.

"We'll keep looking," Ilori had said, with an air of finality that sent the Holts out the door. Pidge didn't fight it. They wouldn't be much help here, and Ilori had already promised--twice--to call the castle with anything she found, no matter how obscure.

Besides, Pidge had their own reasons for wanting to get back to the castle.

"The memory pods," they said to Coran hardly two minutes after Red touched down in the hangar, breathless from sprinting all the way to the bridge. "Where are they?"

Coran blinked, visibly tamping down on his surprise. "You want to create a memory profile?"

"Not me," they said. "Where are they?"

Coran asked no more questions after that, thankfully, just led Pidge down to a quiet, out-of-the-way room lined with three slender pods--more delicate than the cryopods upstairs. These were simple glass tubes, etched with filigree that gave them a frosted look and offered a semblance of privacy to whoever might be inside. At the base of the pod was a silvery inlay, and cords that looked like Q-conduit but barely half the diameter trailed from the top of each pod to a metal fixture on the ceiling, which led to one wall and down to a series of smaller glass chambers mounted on pedestals.

Coran paused just inside the door, his eyes tracking Pidge's every step as they walked to the center of the room and stopped facing the pods.

"I don’t suppose you’d care to let me in on what it is you mean to do here, if you aren't creating a memory profile of your own?"

His gaze prickled along the side of Pidge's head, but for a long moment they were transfixed, the empty memory pods as promising as any Imperial prison computer they'd hacked looking for their father. They couldn't make themself speak just yet, so they simply reached into their pocket and pulled out Ryner's seed.

Hushed footsteps tickled their ear, the soft soles of Coran's shoes making hardly a whisper as he crossed the room.

"What is that?" he asked, stopping just out of arm's reach and bending over to frown at the seed.

"Ryner left it for me," they whispered. "'In case the worst happens.'" They ran their thumb across the surface, tracing the delicate etchings that gave the seed's metal coat a woody appearance. A few small knicks and scratches marred the craftsmanship, the result of Pidge's desperate, aimless tinkering. "I didn't know what it was, but I finally figured it out." They turned, hugging the seed to their chest as they met Coran's sympathetic gaze. "It's Ryner's memories."


	19. Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Pidge, Karen, Matt, and Keith went to Olkarion to get help with the Vkullor problem and to get answers on what, exactly happened to Akira. They didn't make much progress on either front--but Pidge did get a chance to see Ryner's Legacy, a neural archive that finally told them the purpose of the metal seed Ryner left behind. That seed, it turns out, contains Ryner's memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: grief and talk of death in the first scene, which involves Ryner's AI and so brings Pidge's grief back to the forefront. Emotional abuse in Keith's POV scene.

Pidge waited, breathless, as the memory extraction cycle wound down. It had taken longer than they'd expected--nearly a full day--and Coran had chased them out of the pod room last night when dinner time hit. They'd gone only grudgingly, and afterwards, they had fought their mother's efforts to get them to go back to their room and rest.

They hadn't been successful.

Today was a new day, though, and they were back. They’d spent the last two hours hovering around the edges of the room. Coran and Allura had traded off shifts watching over the extraction process, most of which flew far over Pidge's head. They'd deliberately avoided thinking about memory profiles and the AIs that used them ever since Shiro had first brought up the subject so long ago. Thinking about them--much less _making_ a profile--had smacked too much of admitting that any of them might die at any moment.

After Ryner had actually died, they'd put it that much further from their mind.

Coran had explained it all sometime in the endless hours of waiting, but Pidge had tracked only the bare bones of it. Memory was carried in Quintessence, but typically didn't remain in Quintessence for long. In a living person, these pods could siphon through the Quintessence somehow, extracting memories and copying them into a matrix that could then be connected to a specialized Quintessence grid that would carry the memories to the AIs when needed.

You couldn't extract memories from a corpse--not many of them, anyway, and not for very long after death--because the memories weren't actually stored in the Quintessence. Without a brain to supply the information, any residual Quintessence you did manage to extract wouldn't hold much of anything useful.

Ryner's seed, from what Pidge gathered, was very similar to the memory matrix the pods produced--in function, if not in form. Pidge wasn't sure if she'd copied the structure of the matrix or designed something new that could do the same job, but all it took was a little bit of Quintessence to lift the memories from the seed, and the castle was able to transfer them over to Ryner's fragmentary memory profile without trouble.

The seed sat now in the bottom of the center pod, glowing green at the seams as the pod did its work. Ryner's memory profile, which had been a frail, wispy thing at the center of an otherwise empty chamber, had blossomed under the swell of new memories, wisps of light branching off the core and all of it glowing brighter with every passing hour.

It looked a little like a tree, and Pidge found themself transfixed by it. They returned time and again to watch the slow curl of Quintessence through the invisible matrix, rippling light and gently swaying tendrils giving the impression of something far more alive than Pidge could have expected.

All too soon, it was done, and Pidge's heart leaped into their throat. The whir of the pod had become background noise, but they noticed its absence at once. Silence hung in the air like a fog, chilling every breath Pidge took.

"Is it ready?" they asked, turning toward Coran, who together with Allura was murmuring over some readout or another on the central console.

"Just one more step," Coran said with a sympathetic smile. "We've extracted all the memories that seed has to offer. Now it's just a matter of compiling them into something the AI can use."

"How long will that take?"

"A few minutes, perhaps. Not long." He keyed something in on the screen before him, then whispered something to Allura and left her to monitor the process while he came over to join Pidge by the glass cylinder that held Ryner's collected memories. "It won't be perfect," he said, standing beside them with his hands clasped behind his back. "You know that, right?"

Pidge shifted their weight to the other foot, staring at the memory tree so they didn't have to look at Coran. "What do you mean?"

"Memory profiles," he said. "They're a wonderful thing, but they have their limits. It will be good to have Ryner's AI up and running, but I want to make sure you understand that it's not the same thing as getting her back."

"I know that," they said quickly, though the words curled tight around their throat. Their stomach was turning somersaults now, restless and unsettled as the light inside the chamber pulsed.

Coran sighed, placing a hand on Pidge's shoulder. "I just don't want you to be disappointed. The AIs are... bittersweet. It helps, having them around. Keeping their memory alive, remembering the good. But it can sting, too, especially at first. Sometimes it's just too sharp a reminder what we've lost."

Pidge swallowed, their mouth running dry as they fought the ridiculous urge to cry. "I know," they insisted, a little less adamantly than before. "There's just so much I didn't get to say before. I just want to be able to talk to her one last time."

Coran squeezed their shoulder, then patted it twice before stepping away. "All right. We'll be here if you need us."

He retreated after that, pulling back to where Allura still stood at the console. They traded a single, brief, meaningful look that made Pidge's hackles rise, and then Allura turned to Pidge.

"It's nearly finished. Are you ready?"

 _Not even a little._ Pidge nodded, their throat too tight for words, and turned away from Allura and Coran as the glow of the memory matrix intensified. Its pulse felt like a heartbeat now, steady and ceaseless, and Pidge's pulse ran away from them, spiraling quicker and quicker in anticipation. A flicker of light from the corner of the room caught their attention, and they turned toward it, breath sticking in their throat.

The hologram materialized before them, crisp and clear despite the bluish cast of the light.

"Ryner," Pidge whispered, horrified to hear the tears already creeping into their voice but too fixated on the figure before them to fight it.

She was younger than the Ryner Pidge had known, without so many lines at the corners of her eyes, but her face was the same, and her eyes sparked with recognition as she caught sight of Pidge, and then she was smiling, and it was too much like the real Ryner for Pidge to go on pretending.

"Pidge," Ryner said, and the impossible softness of her voice had Pidge in tears all over again, choking on their breath as they struggled to get themself under control. Seeing this, Ryner frowned, stepping forward in concern. She reached out for Pidge, only to stop with her hand an inch from Pidge's skin.

"I'm sorry," Pidge said, the words bursting out of them too fast for Ryner to say anything. Pidge stepped back, clutching their hands to their chest, and stared at Ryner's collar. She wore the Olkari robes she'd worn when Pidge first met her--heavier and stiffer than what she'd worn around the castle, reinforced with Olkari-engineered armor to defend against Imperial raids and the other dangers of Vivasi. Pidge wondered if that was how she saw herself, even at the end--not as a paladin first and foremost, not as a scholar or a scientist, but as the leader of a cell of Olkari rebels, fighting a desperate fight to reclaim her home.

They wondered if she resented them for taking her away from all that.

"I'm sorry," they said again, sniffing and blinking back tears. "I didn't mean for any of it to happen. I didn't mean for-- I should have listened to you."

Ryner's eyes had gone wide, and she stared at Pidge in mounting horror, seemingly rooted to the spot. Pidge wished she would say something, even if it was to yell at them, to berate them for plowing ahead with their stupid, reckless chase, willfully ignorant of the danger they posed to everyone around them.

"Easy now," Coran said, approaching Pidge from behind and wrapping an arm around their shoulders. "Breathe."

Pidge stared at the ground, shame creeping up their neck in a hot flush as their hands came up automatically to wrap around Coran’s forearm. He only shushed them again, rubbing his free hand up and down their arm.

Allura glided forward into the awkward silence, catching Ryner's eye with a smile. "Ryner. It's _good_ to see you. How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Ryner said. She paused, frowning. "I'm dead, aren't I?"

Pidge hiccuped over a sob, drawing Ryner's eye back their way. Her frown deepened.

"You don't need to answer that. I know it's true. Why else would I be integrated into the castle's systems like this?" She blinked, her eyes going vacant for a moment. "I see. Yes. I have been listed as dead in the castle's files. I'm afraid I don't know how it happened, though."

"It was my fault," Pidge said. They stopped there for a moment, focusing on breathing as the guilt crested, swirling over their head until it was all they could focus on. They swallowed, then plowed ahead. "We were looking for my dad. We'd found out Haggar had turned him into her green paladin. She was making him fight us. You wanted to come back to the castle for help, but I wouldn't--" Their voice hitched, and they scrubbed at stubborn tears. "I wouldn't listen. I kept chasing him, and you came with me because you didn't want me running off alone and getting myself killed."

"Pidge," Ryner said, too gentle--too kind considering it was Pidge's fault she was dead in the first place.

They shook their head, shrinking back against Coran as Ryner drifted closer. "I didn't mean for you to get killed, but I wouldn't _listen._ If I'd just _listened_ , you would still be alive."

"It's all right," Ryner said, crouching down now to try to catch Pidge's eye. She was so earnest, so soothing--too much like herself, and far better than Pidge deserved. "It's all right Pidge. None of this is your fault."

Pidge shook their head. How did you tell someone that they didn't know what they were talking about--literally? Pidge had thought it would help, to hear Ryner tell them it wasn't their fault, that she didn't blame them for what happened. But this AI didn't know the half of it. She hadn't been there. She hadn't seen. She didn't know that Pidge had stopped her from defending herself, all because they didn't want to risk hurting their dad.

In light of that, how could anything the AI say ever take away that guilt?

"It's not," they whispered. "It's _not_ all right. None of it! You're gone, and Dad's still a prisoner, and Haggar's still making him fight us--and not just him! Rolo and Rax and Ulaz, too, and they tried to take Luz, and she was going to make Matt kill himself, but then Red sacrificed herself to save him, and then _Akira_ sacrificed _himself_ to save Red, and I'm _tired_ of everyone dying to save people, because it doesn't make it better. It doesn't make _any_ of it better. I didn't get my dad back by getting you killed, and Red's not the same since Akira did what _he_ did, and--"

"Pidge, slow down," Ryner urged, both hands up in a soothing gesture. She couldn't touch Pidge; they knew that, and Ryner seemed to know it, too. She was holding back, but she looked very much like she wanted to reach out and take Pidge by the shoulders and make them breathe for a second before they hyperventilated. "It's going to be okay. Start at the beginning."

"You don't get it," they said, vision blurred now to the point they could hardly see more of Ryner than the watery blue of her skin. "We keep trying to fix things, and it just keeps getting worse. We lost you, and we lost Akira, and we still don't have a fucking _clue_ how to deal with the _Vkullor_ \--"

They cut off with a cry as Ryner's hologram flickered, freezing in the middle of her reaching out a hand. It jumped back and forth between that image and one of Ryner retreating, hand snatched back to her chest and eyes wide with horror. Both versions of Ryner were unnaturally still. Unnervingly so, even without the strange flicker in the image.

She was broken.

That was the thought that sprang into Pidge's mind, illogical as it was. Ryner's AI was broken, and Pidge was immediately certain that that was their fault, too, somehow. Maybe somewhere in all their tinkering, they'd damaged something in the seed, corrupted Ryner's memories, and now her AI was ruined.

Pidge backed away from the hologram, only to remember Coran, who still had his arm around their shoulders. He caught them and steadied them, and Pidge turned toward him, searching for answers.

"One of the flaws of the AI," he said, somber and heavy like he'd been in Pidge's shoes and knew the explanation wasn't going to make it any better. "They're fairly good at synthesizing information, simulating sentience. They can follow the thread of a conversation that treads paths they haven't trod before... But only so long as they can relate the subject matter back to something in the memory profile, or in the castle's basic AI programming routines. Drastically new concepts, or a revelation they can’t simulate a genuine reaction to… Well, it tends to crash the program. Won’t last but a moment."

Two feet away, Ryner blinked, the two images of her snapping back into one, which wavered for a moment before resolving itself. Ryner pressed a hand to her head and stared at the floor, frowning.

"Apologies," she said. "I'm... I'm not sure what just happened."

"Quite all right," Allura said, drawing Ryner's attention away once more before Pidge's meltdown could cause any more bugs to crop up. "Actually, I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me. A... calibration, of sorts. The other AIs assure me it helps them get their bearings as much as it helps us."

They wandered away--just a few feet, but far enough for Pidge to stop feeling like they were being crowded. They pulled away from Coran and swiped at their wet cheeks, trying to breathe and falling again and again into the kind of shuddering half-sob that left them feeling out of control and sick to the stomach.

"I don't understand," they said. "What did I say wrong?"

"Not wrong," Coran said, gesturing them toward a bench near the wall. "It's no one's fault that these things happen. But for what it's worth, I would guess it was the mention of the Vkullor that overloaded the system. You remember what it was like to discover that Keturah had revived it. We’d known about the possibility, but none of us had ever dreamed we would have to fight a beast like that. I’m sure Ryner was the same. It was likely just the initial reaction the AI couldn’t handle. Ryner had a general knowledge of the Vkullor, and we have enough in the archives that she'll at least be able to draw on a factual knowledge for the purpose of conversation."

Pidge turned back to Ryner, who was still conversing with Allura in low tones. From time to time, Pidge was able to pick out a fragment of one of Allura's questions or part of Ryner's response, but they seemed conscious of their company and kept the conversation soft enough that Pidge had to strain to hear.

Ryner's AI seemed stiffer, now that she wasn't talking to Pidge directly. It wasn't quite what Pidge would call robotic, but something about her motions didn't feel entirely organic, like maybe the AI was still trying to figure out how to incorporate the things it had gleaned from Ryner's memories. Pidge wasn't sure if they'd missed that before, or if the momentary glitch had longer lasting effects than Coran was letting on.

It just looked _so much_ like her. Her face, and her clothes, yes, but more than that. It used her gestures, awkward though they were. It spoke with her cadence, with all the gentleness and attentiveness she'd ever shown them in life. It was so close to what they'd had that it made the little flaws all the more glaring.

"How can you be okay with this?" they asked, ashamed to hear the bitterness in their own voice. Coran indicated the bench again, and they dropped down with a sigh. "Sorry. I just--"

"Don't apologize," Coran said, sitting beside them and laying his hand against their back. "We've all been where you are now. It's jarring the first time. There's nothing that can take away that first sting of it. I've found the AIs to be helpful in the long run--once the shock wears off, once you get used to the AI for what it is. Talk to her when you're ready, and only as much as you're able. It's okay to need to step back. We can always turn off the holograms for a bit."

"That's not fair to Ryner, though, is it?"

Coran pursed his lips. "Well, that _is_ a question for you, now isn’t it? Ryner--the AI using her memory profile and adopting her likeness through the hologram--knows what she is. There's little measurable difference, for her, between appearing as a hologram and merely interacting with the castle's other functions by way of the computer core. Furthermore, Ryner--the woman we knew--was a wise and empathetic woman. She would understand that you're hurting, and that you need space."

Pidge frowned, frustrated at their own contradictory feelings. The AI was too like Ryner, and not enough so. They didn't want to deal with a bunch of code masquerading as their dead friend, but they were afraid to offend her by saying so.

"I don't know, Coran," they said at last. "I don't know what I want."

Coran nodded. "Take your time, then." He caught Allura's gaze over Pidge's head and signaled with two fingers, and Allura nodded in return. "We'll ask Ryner to give you some space for now. If and when you'd like to see her, all you need to do is call. Until then, you'll have some time to get used to it."

The tone of Allura and Ryner's conversation shifted, polite smiles turning somber and apologetic. Ryner nodded, and her hologram vanished in a wink.

It was staggering, the way the pressure in the air lifted with her departure. Pidge felt immediately guilty for it, but there was no denying--they breathed easier without a digital ghost standing ten feet away.

"It doesn't have to be forever," Coran assured them. "But you shouldn't feel you have to rush it, either. Take it at your own pace. And remember, we're here for you."

Pidge nodded, a lump in their throat as they stared at the cylinder where Ryner's memory profile still glowed. Allura crossed to the bench where they sat with Coran and claimed the spot on Pidge's other side.

"We mean it, Pidge. We've been there. We've lost loved ones, and their AIs... haven't always lived up to what we lost." She smiled at them, and there were tears in her eyes. Pidge wondered if she was thinking of Alfor, or of Lealle. "It hurts, but it's a pain we can, at least sympathize with. And I do promise it gets better."

Oddly, Pidge actually believed her. It sounded an awful lot like the same trite platitudes they'd heard thrown around with almost catastrophic abandon when their grandfather had died--but coming from Allura and Coran, it didn't sound like a platitude at all.

They scrunched their face up against a fresh flood of tears and turned into Allura's open arms. "Thank you," they mumbled into her shoulder, giving up the fight for once and letting the tears flow.

* * *

"I have a mission for you."

Keith froze, willfully resisting the urge to turn around and punch Keena in the mouth. "The last time you said that, you wanted me to manipulate the people of the homeworld into becoming my own personal army."

He turned, glowering at Keena as she smiled, perfectly at ease, like there was nothing wrong with asking him to go to people who had already been exploited in the name of this war, then turn around and do the exact same thing to them.

"I'm not asking you to raise an army this time, if that's what you're worried about."

Scoffing, Keith turned and began to walk away. Keena had caught him coming off the training deck, and it was late enough that everyone else had already called it a night. No doubt she'd planned it that way--no one to interrupt, no one for Keith to hide behind to avoid her demands.

"Keithka." Keena's voice slid into that needling, saccharine tone he hated so much. It made his skin crawl, her hand on his arm even more so. He glared at that hand, then turned to face Keena, breaking contact in that same motion.

" _What_."

"Hear me out," she said. "Please? You don't have to agree to anything, just--" She ducked her head, her bottom lip sticking out ever so slightly as she chased his gaze. "Don't turn me down before you've even heard what I'm asking."

He hated that it was such a reasonable request. He wanted to ignore her anyway, turn around and walk away, but if he did, there would be no pretending he wasn’t doing it just to spite Keena.

Part of him wanted to walk away for _precisely_ that reason, but he forced himself to stay, crossing his arms over his chest as he glared Keena down.

"Fine. What do you want?"

She flashed a smile, bright and proud, and that smile all on its own scrambled Keith's insides, leaving him queasy and unsteady. "Thank you," she said, and Keith couldn't tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. "There's an Imperial fleet moving through a region of space called the Venzhi Corridor. Major trade route. Highly populated. None of the worlds in the area are officially part of the Coalition, but a resistance group based in the Venzhi Corridor has been supplying us with funds, food, and supplies for the words that need to rebuild. We're afraid Zarkon has discovered these rebels and is moving to destroy them."

Keith narrowed his eyes. "Okay. Why are you telling _me_ about it?"

"Because I want you to lead the team that's going to stop the attack."

She said it like it should have been obvious, but Keith wasn't going to let her twist away from his questions like that. "Why are you the one deciding who to send? Why not take this to the Coalition, or to Shiro and Allura directly?"

Keena waved a hand like she was trying to chase away a gnat. "Oh, they've all got far too much to worry about to deal with this."

"To deal with a major threat to a key ally and trade partner," Keith said dryly. "I think they could make room in their schedule."

"Two days, kitka," Keena said, stepping forward and grabbing Keith's hands in hers. "Think of how many people you could save. _Civilians_. They don't stand a chance without you."

Yeah, and Keith was sure she'd find a way to spin it back towards her plan to set him up as emperor. Probably that was why she didn't want to go through Shiro and Allura--she didn't want it to be _Voltron_ saving these people, much less the Coalition. She wanted it to be Keith, so she could paint him as some noble hero and get the Venzhi Corridor to back him--to back _her_ \--when she made a play for the throne.

"Two days assuming all goes well," he said. "And what if it doesn't? What if it turns into an extended campaign? My team needs me. I'm not going to abandon them just because you tell me to. I'm not going to leave Matt to run missions alone."

"Such a big heart you have," she cooed, dropping his hands and taking his face instead, squishing his cheeks almost to the point of pain and waggling his head side to side. "You know I love that about you. But Keithka, you have to be realistic. You can't be everywhere at once. Sometimes you have to let your allies fight their own battles while you fight yours. If you keep trying to do both, you're going to run yourself into the ground."

"While I fight _your_ battles, you mean." He pulled back out of Keena's grasp, snarling as she instead caught his hands once more. "And it's not like you care anyway."

Keena's brow furrowed. "Keithka... Of _course_ I care. I'm your mother. I only want what's best for you."

Keith couldn't count how many times she'd said the same to him before. She was his _mother_. She _cared_ about him. Maybe at first, he'd believed it, but when had she ever done anything for him, really? She was always asking for his help, always trying to get him to do what she wanted, always guilting him when he refused. What part of that was supposed to make her a good mother?

He'd seen better by now. Karen Holt sometimes butted heads with her children, but she was willing to compromise, and for every time she asked something of Pidge or Matt, she offered her support ten times over--helping Coran on the bridge, researching the Vkullor, lending her expertise to negotiations and writing treaties, going to Olkarion, or even just _being there_ when her kids needed her. Lana and Akani had gone with Hunk to Metos to help with the rebuilding, continuing the work whenever Hunk and Shay's paladin duties called them away. And Lance's mother never asked anything of him except that he come home in one piece.

Shaking his head, Keith yanked his hands away from Keena. "You're not my mother. Do us both a favor and stop pretending you are."

"Keithka," Keena said, chasing after him. Her eyes were wide with shock, and she reached out for him, like she thought he was going to change his mind any moment, like she hadn’t thoroughly ruined things between them with everything she'd done since the day they reunited on New Altea.

"Go to Shiro and Allura about the Venzhi Corridor," he said. "They'll decide the best way to help, and _if_ they decide that Matt and I are it, then we'll go."

"Keithka..."

He turned his back on her, striding briskly down the hall away from her. She gave chase, her long, purposeful strides picking up speed until she was practically running after him.

"Keith!"

He didn't stop until he reached the elevator, where he finally turned, stopping Keena with a frown as she approached. She searched his face, confusion turning to irritation as she realized he wasn't joking.

"You would really sacrifice all those people just because you don't like me?" she asked. "I never realized you were so petty."

The elevator door opened behind him, and he stepped back, refusing to let her goad him into another argument. Rebuttals were already building up on his tongue--he wasn't abandoning anyone; _she_ was the one who was too petty to go to the people who could actually help--but that was just what she wanted. If he tried to debate her, she would just twist his words around to try to manipulate him into doing things her way.

The only way to win her games was to stop playing. So he let the door close between them and jabbed the button for the residential floor. His hand shook as he did so, a heady rush sweeping over him now that Keena was out of sight. He felt weak in the knees, and he leaned back against the wall of the elevator, laughing in disbelief.

“I can’t believe I just did that.”

This was going to cause problems down the line, he knew. Keena was too persistent to let this be the end of it. But for now, he didn't care. She _didn't_ deserve to call herself his mother after everything she'd done, and there was something liberating about saying so to her face.

When the elevator doors opened once more, he stepped out with a spring in his step.

* * *

Haggar had not gotten what she wanted.

That was the message Rolo read between the lines of the latest goings-on in the lab. The wake of the last battle with the paladins had been chaotic, and Rolo counted himself lucky he and the others had mostly been passed over. Zarkon had lost his Red Lion, and Rolo wasn't quite so stupidly optimistic as to think Ulaz had come out of it alive, which left Dark Voltron down a couple of key members.

It was difficult to be happy about that when Ulaz was gone. Rolo hadn't known him long, so he wasn't sure if the ache he felt was grief for the man or disappointment for the loss of their first credible hope for freedom.

Credible.

Rolo almost had to laugh at himself for that. Ulaz had been in the lab for a scant few weeks. He hadn't spoken to them until two days before he was found out and turned into the latest lab rat. He'd offered them little more than some food and a symbol of resistance, but it had kindled Rolo's hope as surely as an all-out assault on the lab's guard force, and to have it all snatched away in a matter of hours was the cruelest of ironies.

Haggar, of course, didn't let Ulaz's death slow her. There had been a flurry of activity the day after the battle. Then, silence, for nearly another full day.

Haggar's return had burst so hot and loud Rolo swore he would have felt it all the way from the cell. He'd been scouting with Sam when it happened. Haggar had come bursting through the lab doors, a wild look in her eyes and a bite in her voice that had the staff scrambling to comply before she flayed them and tanned their hides. She'd sent them all across the complex on errands whose purpose Rolo couldn't fathom, but he'd stayed where he was, watching as the lab emptied and Haggar fell against the counter, clutching her chest like she'd been mortally wounded.

A shame that wasn't the actual truth.

What followed, they mostly figured out in bits and pieces as the druids and their lab techs updated the research logs. All work moved to the hangars for days at a time--much farther than either Rolo or Sam could reach. Guards came once a day to deliver the usual slop that passed for food, and otherwise Haggar and her staff seemed to have forgotten about their prisoners.

"They're building a new one," Rolo said, skimming the logs as quickly as Sam brought them up on screen. "A new Red. Seems like a rush job." He scanned down the list of entries--one per day, each short. Sloppy, too, like whichever druid had typed this up had barely had a moment to find the words. Half of them were just a list of words Rolo didn't recognize, interspersed with the occasional entry he recognized as an engine part, or a type of stabilizer, or a shield array.

"A new one?" Sam asked. "I take it that means they _weren't_ able to recover the old one."

"From the looks of it, no." Rolo ran his finger down the screen, mentally ticking off each component as he went. A Lion was not a ship, by any stretch, but anything that flew into battle had to have the same basic assortment of systems, and this list hit every single one of them, starting from the very framework. "No wonder she's pulled everyone. They're trying to build a lion from scratch practically overnight. She doesn't have the labor for this sort of job. Not at the speed they're taking it. I'm surprised they haven't all dropped dead of exhaustion by now."

"Druids don't have time for exhaustion," Sam said dryly. Maybe he meant it as sarcasm, but Rolo had to wonder if it wasn't closer to the truth than either of them wanted to admit. They said Haggar had extended Zarkon's life by ten thousand years. If she could do that, and if she could control people, who was to say she couldn't simply click her fingers and force people to work through their exhaustion?

Rolo shuddered, but finished out the list and shook his head. "They're making good progress. I don't know what all goes into building something like a Lion, but I have to imagine they're getting close."

Sam hummed, and dove back into the files without a word. A new navigation pane popped up on screen, and Rolo watched as Sam brought them back to the files on the test subjects for Vindication. They'd noticed a file for Ulaz here the last time they'd checked, but there was no new addition to the pilots listing.

In the other file, the one that listed the Lions, however, there was a new addition--Red v.2. Rolo couldn't help but feel a little squeamish as Sam opened it up.

"They use another Vkullor?" Sam asked, nearly as uneasy as Rolo, as he came out of the computer.

Rolo shook his head, his eyes having gone to the species indicator without prompting. "Something called a kotha. Never heard of it."

Sam grimaced. "If it's successor to a Vkullor, I'm going to assume it's bad."

"Doesn't look like they've picked someone to pilot it yet, though. Funny. I'd've thought they'd want to get on that. Didn't your kid say they needed us to forge bonds or whatever? What are they expecting us to do with a stranger?"

"I wish I knew," Sam said. After a beat, he laid his hand atop the computer, wiping every file from the screen. "Let's go. We should finish our rounds and get back."

Rax found them three corridors out, frantic and breathless as he flickered, passing from the end of the hall to just before Rolo and Sam in the blink of an eye.

He grabbed Rolo by the arms, his grip painful enough to make Rolo wince. Rax, however, seemed not to notice. "They took her," he said, his voice breaking. "I couldn't stop them."

* * *

Karen didn't immediately look up when the door to her study opened. The Ibixian treaty needed some reworking after the latest round of talks, and Karen was reading up on their culture and legal system in the hopes that she could offer some insight. It was a complicated system, though, and she was in the middle of trying to decipher a nuanced concept she'd seen referenced several times already this morning. One part social exchange, one part pride, and one part _something_ Karen couldn’t put her finger on, it informed a great many of the Ibixians’ actions, and had, she suspected, posed a major stumbling block to negotiations.

"Just a second," she said, assuming her visitor was Coran or one of his staff, come to seek her advice on a legal matter, or maybe one of her kids looking for a different sort of aid.

Instead, she found her tablet ripped out her hands a moment before Keena grabbed her by the neck and yanked her to her feet.

Gasping, Karen grabbed at the hand holding her, pulling herself up to alleviate the pressure on her throat. "Wh...?"

"You know, something, Karen? I knew you were stubborn, but I never took you for a fool," Keena growled, lifting Karen higher as she tried to get her feet under her. Her toes brushed the ground, and then she was dangling free, her lungs laboring for her next breath.

"What...?" Karen couldn’t finish the question and instead leveled Keena with a glare.

Keena bared her teeth in a horrific grin. "I told you before. Only a fool comes between a mother and her kit."

 _Akem vetok._ Karen remembered Keena ranting about it once before, though she wasn't sure what that had to do with anything. She'd spent as much time with Keith as always since the trip to Olkarion, which was to say not much--and she certainly hadn't done anything to antagonize Keena. Not deliberately. She was too busy fighting for air to say so, however, and Keena showed no signs that she was interested in talking things out.

Darkness boiled at the fringes of her vision, and for a moment, thoughts of Keena's accusation flew out of her mind. Never mind maintaining a civil relationship with Keena; Karen might not _live_ to make amends. She clawed at Keena's hand, but she'd always preferred her nails short, and they didn't seem to be doing anything to Keena, who squeezed tighter, her face blurring as Karen's vision started to go.

She should start carrying a weapon with her.

It was an idle thought, detached from the reality that she wasn't likely to _start_ anything anymore, but she did still have enough awareness to berate herself for thinking she was safe in the castle-ship. Almost all the civilians had begun carrying a weapon of some sort by now, even if it was a nonlethal stun-wand. Only an idiot would go around unarmed after Zarkon’s Hand had gotten inside the castle-- _twice_.

Well, Karen was apparently an idiot, because all she had on her at the moment was a pen--she did still prefer taking notes by hand, however inefficient it might be. She reached for it now, fumbling for her pocket with clumsy fingers as her vision narrowed to the pain in her chest and the burning yellow eyes below her.

Her hand closed around the pen.

She yanked it free and stabbed it down into the hand around her throat.

Keena roared--but she dropped Karen, who landed in a heap, her head spinning and her vision spotted with little bursts of light. She sucked in a breath and immediately started to cough, her throat and chest screaming with every convulsion.

Her pen dropped to the ground beside her, coated in the same violet blood that dripped an erratic pattern on the tiles.

Karen pushed herself up, scrambling back from Keena, who loomed over her, clutching her wounded hand. Karen had caught her between thumb and forefinger, and the sight of so much blood made her sick to her stomach. But she swallowed down the nausea and glared at Keena.

"I could have you arrested for that," she spat, her voice rough and raw. She coughed again, but grabbed onto the arm of the chair beside her and pulled herself to her feet.

Keena snorted. "You could," she said. "But you're not going to."

"You really think so?"

"I do." Keena smiled her usual vapid smile, which looked far more deranged now with the blood dripping from her hand. "You know why?” She leaned in close, her voice dropping to a whisper. “You’re too smart to back me into a corner like that."

Karen pursed her lips, searching Keena’s face for some hint what exactly it was she was threatening. Violence? Likely, but her smile said it was bigger than the two of them.

Karen didn’t like that smile.

"What changed?" Karen asked instead. “Something must have, to make you attack me like this. You’ve never been so crude before.”

Keena growled, deep and threatening. Karen had heard the sound from other Galra before. From the enemy, but also from Kolivan and Antok and Thace--even Keith, on occasion. Keena was typically more circumspect than that, and Karen found herself backing away without meaning to.

"Stay away from my son, Holt," Keena said, jabbing her claw into Karen's chest. The gesture tore a small hole in her blouse and smeared blood all over the fabric. "This is the last time I'll say it."

Karen drew herself up, matching Keena glare for glare. She refused to back down, to acknowledge Keena's demand with either acquiescence or defiance. The former went against every fiber of her being, and the latter was likely to get her killed on the spot. She swallowed, wincing at the twinge of pain, but held her ground.

Keena lingered for another moment, silent except for the near-imperceptible growl rumbling deep within her. Then she left, as quickly as she'd come, and Karen narrowly avoided collapsing then and there. She held herself together long enough to circle the chair so when she dropped, she at least landed on the cushion. She rubbed her throat, wincing again. There would be bruises this time for sure. Maybe she should go to Coran.

She had to be careful about whatever she did. Keena was too vindictive, with too many connections, to take her lightly.

One thing was for certain, however: it was time for Keena to go.

* * *

"We have to stop this."

Sam heard the plea in Rolo's voice, felt the same desperation resonating in his chest, but all he could do was stand in the middle of the room, rooted in place, as Zuza's screams echoed in his ears.

Rax was at her bedside, hands hovering over her like he could soothe her pains, never mind he couldn't even touch her. He was crying silently, his eyes dull and his cheeks glistening with tears as he bowed over the table, heedless of the druids and lab techs walking through him and disrupting his form every time they reached for Zuza's arm to pin it in place so they could inject her with an unknown substance or stick another sensor on a stretch of exposed skin.

"Sam," Rolo hissed.

Sam reached out for him blindly, unable to take his eyes off Zuza for a second. "I know, son. But I don't know what we can do."

Machines hummed away at the edges of the room and all around the head of the table where they'd strapped Zuza down. Some of them Sam recognized from his own stint in this lab, and from Rolo's. Enough that he knew they were turning her into a pilot. But there was more to it this time--so much more Sam didn't know what to make of it, much less how to stop it without doing just as much damage to Zuza.

Rolo grit his teeth, and in another instant, he'd disappeared into the nearest machine.

"Careful," Sam warned. "We need to know what that does before we mess with it."

Rolo didn't reply; none of them had yet mastered the art of speaking without a mouth, though Sam was fairly certain by now that things didn’t follow the same logic on the astral plane. It didn't matter, though; Rolo would be able to hear Sam, and that was enough.

Shaking himself out of his daze, Sam forced himself to do a more methodical sweep of the room. They had all the usual equipment set up: some of it monitoring Zuza's heart rate, brain activity, Quintessence levels, and other vital signs Sam had never been able to decipher. Three of the machines--a silvery coil connected by cords to Zuza's head just below her ears, a massive pump that connected to the table Zuza lay on, and a bank of knobs and indicator lights--were involved in separating Quintessence from the body. Sam was well-acquainted with these, but far too aware that a fluctuation in power at the wrong time could rip Zuza out of her body for good.

Of the new equipment, only one immediately caught Sam's eye. It was a towering thing, control panels and wires and indicator lights covering the broad base. The upper half was smooth and sleek, curving black metal like a pair of jaws opened wide, and a slender glass tube nestled within. Something red and restless filled the tube like liquid fire, casting erratic shadows on the metal around it. It was captivating, and Sam couldn't get close to it without feeling like he was being watched by a predator who would maul him the first chance it got.

Sam turned his attention instead to Rax, who was still shivering as he hovered over Zuza, tears still dripping from his chin, druids still reaching through him without seeming to disturb him in the slightest.

"How is she?" Sam asked, putting an arm around Rax's shoulders.

Rax shook his head, leaning into Sam's touch. "Unconscious," he said, staring down at Zuza, who had indeed gone still. Her face scrunched up from time to time, a pained whimper escaping her. "It may be a mercy."

"It should be over soon." Sam tried to sound confident, when he was anything but. The druids weren't following their usual patterns here. Sam assumed they were trying to separate Zuza, because that should have been the next step in the process. With Sam, it had taken nearly a dozen sessions for them to get it right. With Rolo, they'd reduced that number to four. Sam wasn't sure how long they'd taken with Rax, but he suspected it was quicker than he'd like.

Maybe all this new equipment was an innovation. Maybe they'd found a quicker way to complete the process. Maybe in ten minutes, it would be done--and if nothing else, Zuza would be able to learn how to separate at will and join the others in their exploration and theorizing.

But the druids just kept working. Zuza drifted in and out of consciousness, always in pain, occasionally fighting against her restraints. Rolo passed from one machine to another, growing more frantic each time. They were messing with her Quintessence, he reported, or with her brain, and he didn't know which were safe to sabotage. He focused, instead, on the ones that only monitored, and Sam didn't care that Rolo was giving them away by messing with them. Every minute Haggar's crew spent fighting with equipment was a minute they weren't hurting Zuza.

The druids, however, weren't deterred by the equipment failure. They set techs to fix it, and they pressed on, and eventually Sam had to call Rolo off.

"It's not doing anything," he said. "Save your energy."

Rolo growled and looked ready to dive back into the fight regardless, but in another moment he deflated, joining Sam and Rax in their vigil.

The work continued for hours, some of it familiar, some of it new to Sam. The anticipation in the air crystallized as they drew out Zuza's Quintessence bit by bit, stretching it until Sam was sure she would separate at any moment. After that, at least, she would be able to escape from the pain for a little while.

But the druids stopped before that happened, as they had with Ulaz. The one in charge, Decora, held up her hand, and the techs dialed back on all the machines, holding Zuza in that suspended state, her breath running shallow and her body straining to lift up off the table.

Another druid grabbed a syringe and filled it with the liquid fire from the glass chamber on the new machine. Sam's blood ran cold, and Rolo started forward. Sam grabbed him, though he wasn't sure what Rolo could have done anyway. None of them could stop a living being. All they could do was watch as the druid brought the syringe to Decora, who stuck the needle into Zuza's arm and slowly depressed the plunger, forcing the liquid into her body.

Zuza's eyes flew open, her Quintessence snapping back into her body all at once. She gasped, choking on the beginnings of a scream, and her back arched off the table. Decora forced the last of the liquid in and removed the needle, passing it to an assistant as she stepped back, surveying her work.

"Think it'll take?" another druid asked.

Decora's face was unreadable behind her mask. "We'll see. Let's wrap this up and report back to Lady Haggar."

The druids jumped into motion, undoing the straps holding Zuza in place. She thrashed, but the motion was uncoordinated, and half a dozen Galra jumped in to wrestled her onto her stomach, where she was once more strapped down. One druid held her head in place while another fixed the silvery knob of the master key in place at the base of her skull.

A click of a button, a jerk that shot through Zuza's entire body, and it was done.

"Take her back to the cell," Decora barked. She had already turned away, apparently deciding she had more important things to deal with than a weakened and disoriented prisoner. Zuza was flushed and shivering as the lab techs undid her restraints and dragged her to her feet, and Sam's heart went out to her. The aftermath of a session with the druids was never pleasant, but the master key was on a whole other level.

A pair of guards came forward, shoving her into the hall. She stumbled, but didn't give any other reaction, and Sam followed close behind her, unease building up in his chest as he watched her. Something was wrong. He couldn't shake that feeling, though she didn't seem any worse off than usual, given what she'd just been through. She was walking under her own power, at least, and after that initial shove the guards left her alone.

As they neared the cell, Sam skimmed ahead of Zuza and the guards, sinking back into his body alongside Rax and Rolo just as the lock turned.

"In," the guard barked, and Zuza complied. She kept her head down, and she crossed straight to the back wall, where she sat silently as the door slammed shut behind her.

Sam stared hard at the door, waiting for the footsteps to retreat, but Rolo wasn't as patient.

"Hey," he said, scooting over beside Zuza. "How're you feeling?"

Zuza said nothing, and Sam pulled his eyes away from the door, suddenly far less interested in the guards. Frowning, he placed a hand on Zuza's shoulder and squeezed. "I'm sorry, Zuza. You shouldn't have had to go through that. Are you hurt? Rax might be able to help."

Still no answer. Sam's heart began to pound. He looked up at Rolo, then ducked his head, trying to catch Zuza's eye. When she wouldn't look at him, he caught her face with his hand and gently turned it toward him. The eyes that stared back at him were vacant, their amber glow too bright, too sharp, in a face that held no trace of emotion.

"Zuza?" Sam whispered. "Zuza, answer me. Please."

Cursing, Rolo ran his fingers down the curve of her head and peered at the device embedded in the back of her neck. Where the devices on Rax and Rolo's necks, and on Sam's, though he couldn't see it, were dark and dormant, a magenta glow burned at the seams of Zuza's, pooling in a bulb at the base of the device.

Rax's breath hissed out through his teeth. "They left it on? Why?"

Sam shook his head. "I don't know," he said, running a thumb over the scaled skin of Zuza's cheekbone. He wanted to cry, but it was hard to find the energy after everything else. Instead, he pulled Zuza into his arms and leaned his cheek against the crown of her head. "I don't know."

* * *

"Are you _certain_ you don't want to do anything?" Coran asked, dabbing a cool gel on Karen's neck. It was as ugly as she'd expected, mottled purple and blue with scratches on her skin where Keena's claws had sunk in. Coran hadn't deemed it worthy of a stay in the cryopod, assuring her that the Quintessence-infused gel would ease her pain and speed her recovery. The bruises would be gone in a couple of days, and in the mean time, Karen would just be sure to wear turtlenecks and scarves.

Karen tipped her head further back, giving Coran easier access to her bruises. "Not yet. If we're not careful about this, she's just going to retaliate."

Coran pulled back, frowning. "Well, I'm not going to let her go on attacking people on my ship."

"Believe me, I'm not planning on making a habit of this." She smiled, reaching for her throat before stopping herself and forcing her hand down. "Don't worry. I've got a plan."

He arched his eyebrow. "A plan, you say. Is this a Pidge sort of plan, or a Matt sort of plan, do you suppose?"

"More of a Keena sort of plan." She waited until Coran had capped the tube of Quintessence gel, then stood, fetching her tablet and phone from the counter. "Listen, I'd rather not make you complicit in this whole thing, just in case it goes south. Just...be ready. I don’t expect Keena to go quietly."

Frowning, Coran watched her go. He didn't ask her to reconsider, though, which she appreciated. He really was better off keeping his hands clean here. As the ship's captain, he was the ultimate authority, and Karen wasn't going to give Keena any room to cast his impartiality into question.

She went instead to Thace, who took one look at her and set his work aside. She'd stopped by her room to grab a scarf and run a brush through her hair, but his eyes went at once to her shoulder where, Karen realized with horror, there was a spattering of blackish blood--not as obvious to her eye as the crimson of human blood, but stark against the soft blue of her shirt.

"Something happened," he said, closing the door on his way to set a kettle on the hotplate waiting in a nook along the far wall. "Sit," he added, gesturing Karen toward the two arm chairs in the center of the room.

Karen sat, and proceeded to stare at her hands. A bit of Keena's blood had found its way beneath her fingernails, forming a dark crescent at the tips. She must have done more damage with her nails than she'd realized. Thace returned a moment later with two cups of tea, and Karen curled her hands into fists to hide the evidence before realizing it would be more suspicious not to accept Thace's offering.

"Start at the beginning," he said.

"Keena attacked me," she said bluntly. "Something must have happened with Keith, and she's convinced I engineered it somehow. She was strangling me. I stabbed her with a pen."

Thace paused in the act of sitting down, staring at her in shock. Then he shook his head, sat down, and took a sip of tea. "You did what you had to do. If she put you in a position where you believed your life was in danger--"

"I'm familiar with the concept of self defense, thank you." Karen closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe. "Sorry. I'm a little on edge at the moment, as you might imagine, but I promise you, guilt and fear of legal repercussions for my actions are the farthest thing from my mind. If anything, I wish I'd done more damage."

"Then... you think she's going to do something like this again?"

Karen tipped her head to the side, electing not to mention that, in fact, this _was_ 'again.' She never had found the time to tell anyone about her last confrontation with Keena, but at this point it was moot. "We have a larger issue. Keena wants Keith. She thinks I'm taking him away from her." Which, to be fair, Karen would do in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself. "She wants me to back off."

"Keith hardly needs your intervention to see Keena's many shortcomings."

Karen stared into her tea. "And yet if he finds out she'll attack me if he keeps pushing her away, he'll toss himself to the wolves. Or to the _wolf_ , as it were.”

Thace's face had gone sour, as though he'd over-steeped his tea. "That he would." He raised his tea cup. "I hope you haven't come to me hoping to arrange an accident for my dear sister. You should know that was never my particular line of work."

She happened to know Thace had carried out more assassinations than anyone else on the castle-ship, with the possible exception of Keena herself, but a murder was the last thing the Castle of Lions needed. "Of course not. I only want her off the ship and out of Keith's life."

Thace sipped his tea, placid as ever, pretending not to study Karen. “If that’s all you want, you should have gone to Coran. He has the authority to bar her from the castle for much less than an attempt on your life.”

She rolled her eyes, setting her tea aside, untouched, as she leaned forward. "You and I both know that’s not the real issue here, Thace. We could have kicked her out ages ago, but she’s too well connected to risk pissing her off.” She frowned, her eyes going unfocused as she stared at the floor. “She told me I was too smart to back her into a corner, and I don’t think she was only threatening me.”

“You think she would go after your children?”

That was a horrifying possibility that hadn’t even occurred to Karen, and she stared at Thace for a long moment before she found her voice. “I was thinking the Coalition, but I wouldn’t put anything past her. That’s why we need to make sure that we remove her in a way that doesn’t leave her in a position to hurt us.”

Thace nodded. “You have a plan?”

“Yes. I need to get in touch with Kolivan, and I need to be sure no one else will be listening in on the call."

Her request intrigued him enough that he didn't even ask for more details as he put away his work and sent the tea cups to the sanitizer. He took her out to Green Tower to a comms deck that saw little use. There was a smattering of dust on many of the consoles, though one appeared to have been used more recently than the others.

While Thace worked on setting up the call, he watched her. "You trained in basic combat under Kolivan while you were on New Altea, didn't you?"

"Under Antok, mostly," she said. "And then he sent me to Keena. Why?"

"Have you kept it up?"

Karen pressed her lips together and turned her eyes back to the screen. Truth be told, she'd let her self-defense training lapse for several months after moving into the castle. She wasn't proud of it, but she'd had more pressing concerns, and she'd had neither the need nor the reason to go into battle.

"Matt showed me how to fight those gladiators they have on the training deck. I'm nowhere near the paladins' level, but... I haven't lost everything Antok and Keena taught me."

Thace nodded, extending a small knife, the hilt facing Karen. "Good. Keep this on you for now. You might want to look into getting certified with a pistol."

Karen stared at him. "You think I need a _gun_?"

"I think everyone should be armed, these days, and a knife should never be your primary means of defense." Thace tilted the knife towards her, and she reluctantly took it. The sheath was simple leather, dark and glossy. There was a clip on one side so she could attach it to her belt. It was small enough to be concealed almost anywhere, and Karen found herself immediately searching for somewhere to keep it where it would be out of sight but still accessible.

She wasn't sure if she was embarrassed to be seen with a weapon on her hip, or if she didn't want to tip Keena off.

"All right," she said, clipping the sheath to her belt. It was an awkward weight, distracting every time her elbow brushed against it, but she could hardly argue with Thace's assertion.

This was war, and Karen had made a bitter enemy of Keena. It would be foolish of her not to expect more danger in the coming days.

The call finally went through, and Karen straightened, ignoring the knife as best she could as Kolivan appeared on screen.

"Commander." She inclined her head. "Thank you for speaking with us."

"This doesn't seem the sort of thing to leave to my lieutenants," he said. "I presume your message is one of a delicate nature?"

"It is." Karen glanced to Thace, whose face gave nothing away. "Commander Kolivan. We need your help."


	20. Lines in the Sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Having discovered that Ryner's metal seed contained her memories, Pidge had Coran extract them to finish Ryner's memory profile, but their first meeting with her AI was harder than they expected. Meanwhile, Keena approached Keith with a new mission, to lead an independent team to help a rebellion who's been helping the Coalition. Keith told her to go to Shiro and Allura, refusing to be part of another plot, and called her out when she tried her usual, "I'm your mother; I care about you," line. Furious, Keena blamed Karen and nearly strangled her before Karen stabbed Keena in the hand with a pen. Karen convinced Coran to let her handle it, then went to Thace with a plan to get rid of Keena for good.

Keith was starting to regret lashing out at Keena like he had. She hadn't said anything about it yet, wasn't even avoiding him as she had the last time she was angry with him. But he knew she hadn't forgiven him. She kept too close for him to think that she had.

Most days, he made it through breakfast without seeing her, but no matter what he did after that, she was there. Have a briefing for a mission? She was part of it. Go for some training with Matt or Shiro? She was there, training just across the hall. Relax in the rec room? She'd undoubtedly find a reason to drop by. She always kept her distance, respecting Keith's space. But she did always watch him, her eyes prickling the back of his neck like needles, following him wherever he went. She always looked away again by the time he turned toward her, but he knew he wasn't imagining things.

Fire and fury was on its way.

"Maybe I shouldn't have pissed her off," he confided to Matt. They were headed for lunch, and Keena had still been tearing a gladiator to shreds when they left the training deck. Keith wondered if she was going all out specifically to intimidate him, or if she always took so much pleasure in dismantling her opponent.

Matt scowled. "You didn't do anything wrong," he said. "Keena needs to fuck off."

A smile tugged at Keith's lips, but it didn't last long. "She's still technically an ally. I shouldn't antagonize her."

"I don't think it counts as antagonizing when she started it."

They reached the dining hall, and Keith's stomach immediately began rumbling. The last few days had been quiet, Keena's lurking aside. Shiro and Allura had been so busy shoring up relations with Coalition member worlds that Hunk and Lance had both basically switched over to full-time politicking to help offset the workload. The rest of the paladins had dealt with a few distress calls and joined the Guard and Coalition forces in a few minor battles, but mostly they spent their time researching anti-Vkullor tactics and training to keep themselves sharp.

Keith was surprised how quickly he could work up an appetite when he spent half the day at a desk, bent over tablets and old holo-projectors.

"I don't know, Matt," Keith muttered. "I just can't help feeling like something terrible's coming, and it's all my fault."

"What's your fault?"

Keith jumped as Karen appeared at his shoulder, her plate already loaded with food from tonight's spread, which was one part leftovers, one part castle-prepped sides--the ones that didn't come out too awful to eat--and one part fresh-made Kahale fare. With Hunk off on another round of talks, his family was more distracted than normal, and more fatigued.

"Nothing," Keith said, instantly ducking his head.

Matt, on the other hand, followed Karen toward the table, his hands waving at the air. "Keena's being an ass again and making Keith feel guilty for not bowing to her every whim."

Keith jabbed Matt in the ribs, glaring him into silence. His ears swiveled away from Karen's stare, and he rubbed his arm self-consciously. "It's nothing," he said. "She's just being weird."

"All right." Karen set her plate on the table and gave Keith's shoulder a squeeze. "Well, whatever it is she's doing, try not to worry about it too much. A couple more days, and it'll all blow over, I'm sure. Need me to run interference in the mean time?"

Keith smiled at her, but shook his head. "That's all right. It's my problem. You shouldn't have to deal with it."

For some reason, that made Karen frown, her eyes darting back and forth across Keith's face. "All right..." she finally said. "You just let me know if you need anything, okay? Anything at all."

He nodded, already making a break for the food table. He'd meant what he said. He would deal with Keena so Karen didn't have to--and she _shouldn’t_ have to, after everything else she'd done for him. She'd showed him just how lacking Keena was as a mother. She'd given him the courage to cut ties once and for all.

Now he had to deal with the fallout.

* * *

"Do these people not realize the stakes?" Shiro asked, collapsing into his seat behind the Black Lion's controls as Allura took her place behind him. How she managed to stand without slouching after a full day of circular arguments and fruitless negotiations with the locals was beyond him. Personally, he wanted nothing more than to find his bed and not leave it for the next ten hours. Sometime in the last year, his life had become at least as much diplomacy as fighting--and somehow the diplomacy was the more exhausting of the two.

Black rumbled her sympathy, though there was a touch of amusement that Shiro answered with a disgruntled sort of rebuff. It was all well and good that the _lion_ didn't have to deal with these people; if she had, Shiro would bet anything she'd have turned them into target practice by the time they broke for lunch.

Allura soothed him with a thought, her weariness echoing his own. "They're frightened," she said. "Most of them have never fought in a war at all, much less against someone with Zarkon's resources. They want to win, want to secure their freedom, but they've survived this long by not calling attention to themselves."

"And the more people abandon this fight, the more dangerous it's going to be for those who remain," Shiro said, flinging an arm out. "It could start a chain reaction that will leave us with no allies--and even if it doesn't, if we lose because we don't have the support we need, then there's no telling when or _if_ the universe will be able to mount another counteroffensive like this one."

He stopped himself with a sigh. Arguing with Allura wasn't going to accomplish anything. She agreed with him, and she was fighting just as hard to convince the Covelian government not to pull out of the Coalition. Most of the last two weeks had been spent sprinting around the universe, visiting with politicians and generals and shoring up the Coalition one promise at a time.

It couldn't last.

What they needed was a solution to the Vkullor problem. The Olkari had promised an answer as quickly as possible, and though Shiro knew he had to give them more than a handful of days, he couldn't help his impatience as he waited for word from them.

"We've bought ourselves some time here," Allura reminded him. "Covelia may not be fully committed to the Chettok plan just yet, but at least they haven't withdrawn."

And in a week, they'd probably be back here all over again, pleading with panicky politicians not to screw them all over. Shiro pinched the bridge of his nose, but he forced himself to listen to Allura. They _had_ succeeded here today. It wasn't a permanent solution, but it was a victory, if a minor one.

That was the trend lately: holding ground, buying time.

He nudged Black to her feet with a thought, and she gathered herself for a leap that took them to the edge of the atmosphere. Their work for today was done, and it was time to head back to the castle-ship, where--hopefully--they would find a few hours of rest and relaxation before another political crisis inevitably popped up tomorrow.

"Is it bad that I miss the life-or-death fights against impossible odds?" he asked dryly as Allura opened a wormhole for them. "Sure, we faced death around every corner, but at least everyone on the battlefield is on the same page."

Allura snorted, and Shiro smiled at what she wasn't saying. She missed it, too. She'd trained for this sort of thing her whole life, and even she was tired of the politics. It made Shiro feel a little bit better about himself. If the princess and born diplomat couldn't keep up with all this empty talk without getting frustrated, then no one could expect Shiro to--black paladin or no.

Not that it mattered, in the end. They would keep meeting with allies as often as they had to, for as long as it took. Because when it came right down to it, they _needed_ the Coalition. Not just to win the war, but to build something worthwhile when it was all over.

They hadn't talked much, yet, about the _afterward_. To talk about it openly felt too much like jinxing themselves, like if they rushed ahead to the rebuilding that came after victory, none of them would live to see it. But Shiro had been thinking about it, and he knew Allura had been, too--probably more than Shiro. Learning what had led to Zarkon and Keturah's betrayal, how this war had begun, had given them all something to think about. Voltron was immensely powerful, and too small to adequately represent the diversity of the universe. They needed it to win the war; no one could question that. But what happened after? When Zarkon and Haggar were dead, what did they do with the superweapon that had toppled them?

These were the sorts of things Shiro thought about at night when he couldn't sleep. It boggled his mind, even now. It had been year since he could say with any amount of honesty that he was just a simple pilot who followed orders and didn't worry about much beyond getting his crew safely where they needed to go... But neither could he say he'd ever come to think of himself as the military and political leader the rest of the universe regarded him as. He was beyond out of his depth, and his only consolation was that at least his friends didn't expect him to be something he wasn't.

The magic of wormholes being what it was, the flight lasted a scant five minutes--nowhere near long enough to work out the tension that had crept into his neck and shoulders over the course of the long day. He momentarily considered staying out longer, going on a joyride just to relax, but rejected the notion before Allura picked up on it. With his luck, they'd get an emergency call in two hours, and then he'd regret the waste of time.

Even if he did miss flying just to fly.

They landed in Black's hangar, the cockpit filled with the kind of silence that came from overwork and the resulting fatigue. Their minds had settled into a comfortable orbit--none of them offering up any particular insights or questions to ponder, all of them merely comfortable in their proximity.

It was with great reluctance that Shiro left the controls behind and head for the exit with Allura, their minds slowly pulling apart.

"Any minor crises on the docket for tomorrow?" he asked. "I'd like to try to do my homework before we go, for once."

Allura swatted his arm. "You don't need to do any such thing."

"Easy for you to say. You grew up studying other cultures and their customs. I just blunder into each of these meetings like a neanderthal, hoping I don't mortally wound someone's sensibilities."

"You haven't ruined anything yet."

Only because Allura was always ready to step in if he strayed into dangerous territory, and because she supplied him with the basics of local etiquette on their way to each conference. One of the many boons of sharing a brain, he supposed.

After a moment, Allura relented. "Officially, no. There's nothing scheduled for tomorrow. But I would like to meet with the Quinnair and the Il'qek soon. They've both been getting skittish, and the fact that they _haven't_ reached out to us has me worried."

"You think they're going to pull out?"

"I don't know. Perhaps they're fully committed to the war and just don't want to bother us." She shook her head. "I can't help feeling that they're going to make a bid for a quiet exit, like we won't notice if they suddenly remove themselves from the Coalition."

Shiro snorted. "Sometimes I have to wonder how much thought any of these people put into the decisions they make."

Allura spread her hands, starting to say something about different cultures, but Shiro had stopped listening.

They'd reached the side door, the one they usually took when they left the hangar, since the elevator in the hangar only connected to the prep room and the bridge. As today had been a diplomatic meeting, there was no armor to shed and no formal debrief. Shiro had been looking forward to a quick meal and then rest.

It seemed the universe had other ideas.

Red was in the hallway outside Black's hangar, wandering along seemingly without a care in the world, hands behind their back and face turned toward the ceiling. Admiring the decorative embellishments that lightened up even the most austere of service corridors? Shiro couldn't say.

All he knew was that it still _hurt_ to look at them. They'd dressed in a surplus Altean jumpsuit rather than Akira's usual clothes, perhaps in an attempt to appease the paladins. Bad enough to see Akira's face in the halls, to hear his voice, to watch someone else quirk his crooked smile or roll his hands as they talked. If Red had worn any of the clothes he'd brought from Earth, Shiro might have snapped.

If they'd worn his Guard uniform, Layeni might well have skinned them alive.

"Shiro," Allura said, her hushed voice insistent, like she was preparing to drag him away by the roots of his hair.

Unfortunately, the sound of her voice drew Red's attention, and they turned, hands falling to their side as they caught sight of Shiro.

"Oh," they said. "You're back."

Shiro closed his eyes, breathing through the emotions that stirred in response to that voice. It wasn't quite right--too flat, too reserved to be Shiro's brother--but it was close enough to sink its hooks into him. He breathed, and he opened his eyes, forcing himself to meet Red's gaze. The gold in their eyes had never faded; the hallway was too brightly lit to see much of its glow, or to pick out the markings on their face as anything more than freckles, but even without the glow, Red's eyes demanded attention. The yellow was too vivid to be natural, a more saturated shade than Keith or Shay's eyes. They flashed in the light like polished metal.

The eyes, without a doubt, were the most inhuman part of them, and as such, the best reminder that Red was not Akira, no matter how much Shiro wished they were.

"We just arrived," Allura said, all brisk and silken, the way she talked with world leaders, sweeping them along into a discussion before they could bluster into a hasty retreat or turn the paladins away at the door. "I hope you are well."

It was a dismissal without being a dismissal, and Allura looped her arm through Shiro's as she began to walk away, towing him along with her. He didn't fight it. Likely he couldn't have if he tried. Allura didn't flaunt her Altean strength outside of battle very often, but she could overpower him easily if she chose to, and he suspected this would be one of those times.

It was probably for the best. Being around Red made him uneasy--angry, but without a focus so that he just worked himself into a knot, stewing over the things he couldn't change and straining himself not to take it out on Red. As much as he wanted to blame someone--anyone--for what Akira had done, it _had_ been Akira's choice. Even Keith agreed on that point, thought Matt seemed to think Red had tricked him into it somehow.

"Shiro--"

Red's breathless call stopped him in his tracks. It sounded so much like Akira, even more so without those alien eyes to ground Shiro in the truth. He shuddered, and Red's foot scuffed across the tiled floor.

" _Shiro_."

Shiro straightened, throwing off the illusion. Akira only ever called him by his given name. He'd mocked Shiro relentlessly in their academy days when their classmates had first bestowed the nickname. Accused him of trying to sound cool--and accused the other cadets of being unable to remember anything longer than two syllables.

Shiro had never understood it, but then, names had never carried the same weight for him as they did for Akira. Shiro didn't care what other people called him. But it meant something that Akira had always called him Takashi, even after graduation, even into their early careers with the Garrison, where half the people they met seemed to think Shiro's full name was Shiro Shirogane.

It _meant_ something that Akira had never bought into any of the hero-worship and glorification that chased the name _Shiro_ through the Garrison's halls.

He turned, a frown tugging at his lips as Allura tugged at his arm, and he fixed Red with a glare, ready to tell them off. He stopped at the look of desperation on their face. Not just desperation. Hurt. Grief. And a longing so potent it left Shiro breathless.

In an instant, Red caught themself and pulled it all back behind their usual blank mask. They took a single step back, rubbing the back of their neck and looking anywhere except at Shiro.

"Sorry," they said briskly. "You should--go. Eat. It's that time, right?" They glanced at their wrist, then paused and frowned--realizing they weren't wearing a watch? Or confused as to where the impulse had come from? Another step back, and a jerk of their chin toward the door to Black's hangar. "I'm just going to hang out with Black for a bit, if that's--? I mean. Just let me know if you need me to clear out. Um."

Shiro hated to see them so uncertain. It looked wrong on Akira's face, and despite himself, Shiro wanted to offer them comfort.

He held back, though, conscious of Allura's hand around his arm. She knew him too well. Because he would try to help Red, if she let him, and it would only end up hurting more.

"Yeah, sure," he said, wondering if his voice sounded as wooden to Red and Allura as it did to him. "See you."

It felt too casual for the train wreck that was Red's relationship with just about anyone in the castle, but if the alternative was a cold dismissal, Shiro supposed he would just have to plaster on a smile and pretend they weren't all hurting. Maybe it was a good thing Red was going to see Black. She'd probably be able to help them more than Shiro ever could.

Allura tugged on his arm again, and this time he let her pull him away. The silence stretched to fill the hallway, Allura's soft footfalls and Shiro's heavier ones the only sounds. He wanted to turn back and see if Red was still there, watching him. If they were back to looking lost and heartbroken.

He didn't let himself, and before long, Allura had dragged him all the way to the kitchens, where there was virtually no chance of another awkward brush with the lion in his brother's body.

She found some leftovers for them to eat, and Shiro picked at the food, but his appetite was gone, and hardly ten minutes later, he excused himself.

Sleep was hard to come by that night.

* * *

Pidge avoided Ryner for three days. They avoided each other _._ Coran had promised he wouldn't restrict Ryner to the computer core, as they'd done with the other AIs while they tried to figure out who the spy was, and Pidge took him at his word. Ryner was just... respecting Pidge's grief and waiting until they were ready before she tried approaching.

At least, they assumed so. Mostly they tried not to think too hard about any of it. The idea of seeing Ryner, of talking to--to some remnant of her, at least--didn't ignite quite so much of a panic as it had in the wake of their first, disastrous conversation.

They'd talked about it with their mom. (There was hardly any avoiding _that_ conversation, not when Karen knew exactly what had happened.) Green had been in an uproar, it seemed. Not upset, exactly, but...

Well, she'd been in just about the same place as Pidge. Having Ryner back as an AI reopened old wounds, and that was spilling out every which way.

"Give yourself time," Karen had told them. "But when you're ready, you should talk to her. It's... It's more helpful than you might expect."

They'd looked at her, something in them quivering in anticipation. "You've talked to her?"

Karen nodded. "Only for a little while." She smiled, a little teary-eyed. "It's difficult, I know. It hurts, knowing that she's gone. It's hard to remember that she's just an AI. And... impossible to forget it."

Pidge cringed at that, leaning against Karen's side and hugging their knees to their chest. "Yeah... That sounds about right."

Karen rubbed their back. "It'll get easier, Pidge. Just take it a little bit at a time."

A little bit at a time. Pidge wasn't sure what that meant, but they were figuring it out. First it was a visit to Green--more wallowing in their shared pain than anything. But there was something about the wallowing. No, about the _feeling_. About _letting_ themself feel. It was an exhausting day, and it left them feeling gutted.

Val was waiting for them when they emerged, with a thin smile and a full platter of Hunk's peanut butter cookies. She didn't ask them to talk, but they wound up bundled together under the biggest blanket they could find, sprawled across the rec room couch with mindless alien cartoons playing out on the wall.

By the next day, they were ready.

That was, of course, a lie. They weren't ready, and they never would be, but they'd promised themself a long time ago that they weren't going to hide away forever. Not from their guilt or their grief, and certainly not from a little bit of programming fueled by the memories of one of their closest friends.

They grabbed Val after breakfast, staring at their shoes as the last few paladins filed out, and scrounged for the courage they needed. "I'm going to find Ryner. Will you come with me?"

Val smiled and squeezed their hand. "Of course. You know you don't have to go searching, though, right? You can just call her."

"I know. But it's... It doesn't feel right." They turned, leading the way out of the dining hall. Val kept pace behind them. "Besides. I think I know where she'll be."

* * *

Ryner's hydroponic garden was flourishing, even without her there to look after it. She'd trained up a staff to take care of the things she didn't have time for, and with everything that had happened lately, the garden had become a moderately popular place for the castle's residents to go to get away from the war for a while. Coran had even expanded it in the last round of reconfigurations, more than tripling the size. Most of the new space went to flowers and trees that were nice to look at, arranged like a little park, with benches and a couple of fountains scattered along the winding paths.

The war being what it was, about half of these plants also had a practical purpose--spices for the kitchen, or medicinal plants the castle could process into pills and creams to treat minor illnesses and injuries. Some of them, though, were just nice to look at, and Pidge wasn't surprised to find a dozen or so people enjoying the peace when they arrived with Val.

"I should come here more often," they said, pausing by the little plaque inset in the retaining wall beside a planter full of Olkari foliage. The plaque bore Ryner's name, along with a few lines summarizing her life--not nearly enough. But when Pidge touched their fingertips to the neat, orderly letters of her name, a holographic projector started up, playing through a video that highlighted her accomplishments, accompanied by images of Ryner in battle that must have come from the other paladins’ armor cams.

Val squeezed their shoulder. "She'll never be forgotten," she said. "It's not the same as having her back, but... People will know who she was, what she did for her people. For the _universe_."

"She deserves it," Pidge said, and tore their eyes away from the image of Ryner looking out over Inanimasi on the day the paladins helped the Olkari people reclaim their planet.

Their real target was deeper into the gardens, past the burbling fountains and shaded paths, beyond the reach of the simulated bird calls and carefully augmented perfumes of the flowers. The old gardens--the neat rows of shrubs and vines and small fruit trees, where Ryner had found a way to grow the fresh fruits and vegetables they'd all missed so much--were tucked away in the very back. No one visited this place except the caretakers. It was too utilitarian a space, designed for efficiency rather than aesthetics.

It was this space that Ryner herself had worked on.

It took only a moment to spot her among the shrubbery, off in the corner with one of the caretakers, studying a display on the hydroponics control system. Pidge's heart crept into their throat once more, but Val stepped forward, edging into the periphery of Pidge's vision.

"You're okay," she murmured. "You've got this."

Pidge nodded, squared their shoulders, and took the plunge.

"Ryner," they called as they crossed the room. She turned at once, and their eyes locked over a row of small, leafy plants that reminded Pidge vaguely of vibrant orange cabbages.

Ryner's eyes widened, then softened with a smile, and she turned to the caretaker she'd been speaking with, who waved her off. Pidge rounded the end of the planter and almost lost their nerve when they realized that Ryner wasn't the only AI here. Sa was just beyond her, crouched beside a planter with his nose in among some ivy and his tail lashing behind him. He looked up at Pidge's approach, but soon grew distracted again by a line of bugs marching along the planter's edge.

"Pidge," Ryner said, gliding to meet them, her feet skimming just high enough off the ground to be noticeable. She stopped a short distance away and clasped her hands at her waist. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to see _you_ ," they replied, and were surprised to find they meant it. They lifted their eyes away from Ryner's feet, away from her folded hands, and looked her in the eyes.

She was still too young for the woman Pidge had known, and that was as jarring as ever. But she was smiling, and it was the same smile Pidge knew--soft and thoughtful, making creases at the corners of her eyes. The silence stretched between them, Ryner nodding to Val in greeting and Val waving awkwardly back and everyone seemingly waiting on Pidge to break the ice.

"I'm sorry," they said at last. "For freaking out the other day. I didn't think it would be that hard, seeing you again. I just couldn't..." They fumbled for a way to say it that wouldn't be rude. Saying that they couldn't stand the sight of her face sounded almost as bad as accusing her of being too good a fake, so they opted instead for a diplomatic silence.

Thankfully, Ryner read them as easily as always. "I understand. And you don't have to apologize. Speaking with your mother and reviewing the castle's records has... filled in some of the gaps for me." Her antennae lifted in that way they did when she was contemplating something. "You know, I was going to have Rhynna take some measurements for me before she left, and I completely forgot to mention it. Would you mind lending me a hand?"

Pidge gave her a wry smile but went to fetch the probe she indicated. It wasn't about the measurements at all, of course. Not only could Ryner easily have pulled temperature and pH data, along with the concentrations of the various nutrients, directly from the automated monitoring system, but she likely didn't even need them in the first place. She just knew that Pidge would be more comfortable if they had some way to keep their hands busy. There was a reason most of the heavy conversations with Ryner while she was alive had taken place while they were working on Green.

Pidge didn't mind the distraction. Nor did they mind the pretense that this was a favor for Ryner. They picked up the probe, found another one for Val, and followed Ryner's directions, taking measurements in each planter and marking them down on a tablet for Ryner. Curiously, the garden had completely emptied out in the five minutes they'd been here--and if Sa thought Pidge didn't see him lurking by the archway that led to the other half of the garden, then he severely overestimated his ability to sneak around.

They talked while they worked, catching Ryner up on everything that had happened since she died. Pidge found it all surprisingly helpful--not just having something productive to talk about to get past the awkwardness with Ryner's AI, but actually talking through the problems they were dealing with now.

Ryner didn't freeze up this time when Pidge got to the Vkullor, though she did turn more clinical in her replies. She _felt_ more like an AI for those few minutes, and each of her answers might as well have been plucked directly from the many texts in the castle's archives she'd probably used to bridge the gap in Ryner's memories.

But... Pidge could learn to live with that. It _was_ nice to see her again, and to talk to her. Sure, she kept waving away Pidge's attempt to apologize for getting her killed, and sure, those assurances would have felt more substantial coming from someone who could remember what happened, but by the time they'd made their way down the last row of planters, Pidge felt more settled. Their words had run dry a quarter of an hour ago, but Val had jumped in with stories of her childhood--the terror she'd wreaked with Sebastian and Lance, the mischief Luz had gotten into even as a toddler.

It took the focus off Pidge for a moment, giving them time to process. It was a lot to take in, but Coran and Allura and Karen had been right. However much it stung, however much the things the AI was _not_ ached, Pidge was glad to have her around.

Ryner seemed _happy_ , and even though Pidge knew that was as simulated as the rest of it, it still felt like closure. Better for the freshest memories of Ryner to be of her in this garden, hard at work and laughing as Sa reappeared chasing a holographic bird that had escaped the main garden. Better this than the pain, fear, and emptiness that had swallowed every other memory of her for too long.

"It's almost lunch time," Val said in a lull between stories, while Ryner went to rescue the bird, which had exceeded its programmed range and kept flitting in and out of the walls. Sa had perched himself high in the branches of a tree that couldn't possibly have supported his weight, had he been anything more than pure light, and was watching with interest, musing about the AI that controlled the birds--a much simpler AI than his own, of course, since the birds were only meant to create the feeling of open air and actual wildlife that a castle-ship in space could never attain.

Ryner finally coaxed the bird away from the wall and released it back toward the main garden, then turned to Pidge with a smile. "Thank you for coming to see me."

Pidge smiled back. "Yeah. Maybe I could come back? You never really got to teach me all that much about the Arts, and I've been having some difficulties with your garden down in Green's hangar. We could... maybe work on it together some time?"

Ryner's smile turned softer, her eyes brimming with emotion that made Pidge's throat close. "I would like that very much."

* * *

Karen grunted as her back hit the mat.

"You were closer that time," Thace said, holding her down with a hand on her chest for just a moment longer--just long enough to get the point across, she supposed. Then he straightened, grabbing her hand as he did so to pull her to her feet. "You need to watch my hands."

"Yes, yes, I know." Karen brushed her hair out of her face and blew out a long breath. "I need to watch your hands, I need to watch your feet, I need to be aware of my _own_  feet, or I'm going to trip us both up together, and how does that do me any good, right?" She massaged her forehead, but shook off her frustration and reset, breathing to find her center.

It was early, even by Karen's standards. She was often one of the first ones up in the morning, but Thace's wake-up call today had dragged her kicking and screaming out of an exhausted sleep. She was willing to bet that Pidge _still_  wasn't asleep, though nearly everyone else was, even Keena.

Especially Keena. The last thing Karen wanted was for her to catch wind of these training sessions.

They'd been going for a week now, ever since Keena's last attack--Thace and Karen getting up in the middle of the night to spar and drill takedowns and such. Anything and everything Thace deemed necessary to keeping her alive. He had her down at the shooting range most days, too, though not until they were winding down. He was smart enough not to trust her with a firearm when what she was barely qualified as conscious.

Part of her wanted to protest these training sessions. The part that missed getting a full night's sleep and having the energy to carry her through the rest of the day. Also the part that disliked bruises and wounded pride.

The rest of her knew how important it was to be able to defend herself, so she deferred to Thace, sucked it up, and showed up every day to have her ass handed to her again and again.

They'd claimed one of the smaller private training rooms tucked into a quiet corner of the training deck. A round room, only about ten feet across, it didn't leave them much room to maneuver--but considering most of what Thace was drilling into her was meant for close-quarters, the space really wasn't an issue. She was just grateful the floor here had a little extra padding.

She would know; she'd become well-acquainted with the floor of this room in particular.

"How do you think it's going?" Karen asked as she squared off with Thace once more.

Thace's ear swiveled, the movement almost lost in his thick hair. "Kolivan?"

"Who else? You think he's found anything?" They'd given him very little to go on. Not wanting to expose Keith to attention he clearly didn't want--much less open him to the possibility of Keena dragging him down with her--they'd left the details of Keena's plot to usurp Zarkon's throne hazy at best. Kolivan surely knew there was more to that story, but he didn't press. There was no reason to. Plotting to put her son in command of the Galra Empire might ruin her reputation, but it was difficult to prove a plot. Even had Kolivan been so inclined, he probably couldn't have brought Keena down on that charge alone.

That was why Karen had asked him to look into a different scheme. One, admittedly, she had even less proof of--but with Karen and Thace both testifying to Keena's shadowy ambitions, Kolivan was willing to devote a small task force to chasing down hunches. Karen had given him a list of worlds--not the worlds that were committed to the Chettok campaign, and not the ones on the verge of leaving the Coalition, but the ones riding the fence. The ones who hedged and fidgeted but never made any moves. Not openly. Keena wasn't ready for that yet.

Karen didn't know how many of them she'd got right. She didn't know if Kolivan would find anything even if she'd pointed him towards worlds that had something to find.

She just had to hope, because the way to get rid of Keena wasn't to push her out. It was to get her pulled.

Thace sighed, drawing Karen's attention back to him. "I don't know, Karen," he admitted. "I hope he's found something, but you know he has to be quiet about it, same as us. We can't afford to tip Keena off."

By which he meant, of course, that they shouldn't be talking about it, not even in the middle of the night in a private training room with no one else around. Keena didn't have Keturah's direct link to the security feeds and hologram interface, but she had her own way of finding things out. They really did need to be careful.

So Karen focused once more on the task at hand, and Thace reset, coming at her in an attempt to force her to the ground.

This time, for once, Karen's body remembered the moves Thace had drilled into her, Keena and Antok before him. A whirl of motion, running on instinct that even caught Karen herself off guard, and suddenly Thace was lying flat on his back, Karen's hand at his throat. He grinned, wheezing in a breath.

"That's it," he said. "Let's run it a few more times."

* * *

"I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

 _ **Really,**_ Black said, deadpan. _**You don't have**_ **any** _ **idea what it is about you that might be making them uncomfortable.**_

Red lifted their head, glaring at the underside of their sister's chin. It was a different experience, talking to her like this, and one Red wasn't sure they appreciated. Sure, they could have stayed inside the lion body, where their atrophied bonds with their sisters were stronger, but that had its own downsides. It reminded them too acutely that they were stuck here, permanently removed from Oriande, where the connections had remained as fresh and clear as the day they'd split.

...Which was why they kept coming back here, almost daily for a week now, even though it hurt.

"You're not funny," they told Black. "And yes, I know it must be awkward for them, to see him when they look at me. But they've had time. I've tried to give them space. What else do they want from me?"

Black was silent for a long moment, and Red began to squirm. They saw, again, the way Shiro's breath rushed out of him at the sight of them, when they’d crossed paths outside this hangar a few days ago. The way his Quintessence flashed and flickered with pain. The stricken look on his face the last time he'd looked back at them. It hit them again: a surge of panic and guilt that coiled around their neck like a noose, stealing their voice and making their lungs go tight. Seeing Shiro hurting made _them_ hurt, deeply and desperately.

They were shaking again, trembling like a campfire in a windstorm, and a frustrated growl built in their throat as they gripped the edges of Black's paw beneath them.

"I didn't _ask_ him to do this," they muttered.

_**You didn't stop him, either.** _

Red glared again, hating that Black could get under their skin like this. The others were watching this conversation at a distance, none of them keen to step in. Red could only just sense them; Akira's body wasn't attuned to this sort of thing, and the various Altean gadgets built into Black's chassis to augment the bond were too far away for Red to hook into them.

Nevertheless, they could sense Green's keen focus, like a spectator at a sporting event, and Yellow's occasional bursts of satisfaction and agreement, like she was nodding along to what Black was saying.

Blue alone remained silent--or at least withdrawn enough that Red couldn't sense her at all. She was there, though, they were sure. Watching. _Judging._

"Would you rather I left you to finish this war alone?" they growled, baring their teeth though Black couldn't possibly see. "I'm sure that would have gone well."

 _ **I'm not saying it wasn't necessary,**_ Black said, a hint of apology in her tone. _**But you can't expect them to be happy about it.**_

No, they couldn't. And they _didn't_. There was no reason it should have stung as much as it did to have all of Akira's friends turn against them. It wasn't as though Red had done this to make friends or anything. They were trying to win the war. As long as all the lions remained functional and Voltron battle-ready, then they'd done their job.

Red pulled their legs up and wrapped their arms around them. Such an ungainly body. They were still struggling to get used to it. "Why are we even talking about this?" they asked, letting their head loll back. "This isn't what I came here for."

 _ **Isn't it?**_ Black asked innocently.

Red wished they were in their old body, back in Oriande, so they could muster a proper snarl. "It's not and you know it. You just wanted to pry into my personal life for your own amusement."

_**Breathe, Red. It's my understanding that human bodies need to do that.** _

Somewhere, more distantly, Red heard someone--Green, they thought--muttering, _**Personal lives? Since when do any of us have**_ **personal** _ **lives?**_

 _ **It's her human showing,**_ Yellow added.

The snarl redoubled, spite and anger rising like bile in the back of their throat. They wanted to snap back at their sisters, tell them to butt out, tell them that, yes, okay, maybe they had changed since merging with Akira. Maybe their emotions were all over the place, blazing into pyres at the most unexpected times and vanishing in the next moment, leaving them gutted and tired.

They'd never been so tired as they had been almost constantly in the weeks since they'd taken on Akira's body.

They pushed off Black's paw as the sudden urge to be alone swept over them. It was difficult to truly be alone when you were part of a larger whole, but their human form offered them some semblance of solitude, provided they climbed to the tip of one of the castle's towers, far beyond the reach of the lions' built-in network. There was still a whisper of their sisters' voices wherever they went, a little tickle reminding them of what they were running away from. Even at the university on Olkarion, removed from their lion and from their sisters, they hadn't truly been alone.

It was still an improvement over sitting here listening to the others ridicule them.

 _ **Red,**_ Black called, exasperated, as Red retreated.

Red lifted one hand, middle finger extended--something they'd discovered to be immensely satisfying for no logical reason--and didn't stop walking. There was a rumble of discontent, a flicker of a hint of a suggestion of an apology from Yellow, and then Red was out in the hallway once more, bundling it all down again, out of sight with everything else.

Win the war.

That was what they were here for. Once they were finished, they would try to find a way to make up for what they had done.

* * *

Keena ate breakfast earlier than usual, staring at her personal computer while she shoveled food goo into her mouth in one quiet corner of the commissary. She could have eaten in the smaller dining hall upstairs that the paladins and their families used--no one had yet officially barred Keena from using it, though she had no doubt Karen was working on that. Some days, it was a battle worth fighting.

Today, she had other concerns. So she'd come here: early enough that she was mostly alone, tucked away where no one would bother her, eating food that took no thought and no effort, skimming through dozens of coded messages from her agents across the universe that had come in overnight.

These were only the daily check-ins from those agents who could afford such a thing--the ones on civilian worlds and low-sec labs and prisons where the staff was permitted casual contact with family and friends elsewhere in the Empire. For more substantial reports, as well as those from agents in deep cover, she would need to go to her office out in Green Tower, where she had better comms equipment and heightened security.

From the looks of it, she needed to get out there as quickly as possible today. Though most of the daily reports were unremarkable, commenting only on the state of the Empire, and of the Coalition, many of them noting no change, four had included the code phrase indicating a thorough and urgent report to follow.

Keena didn't like it. One urgent report was interesting. Two was exciting; it meant things were happening. More than three, all in a cluster like this, was an omen.

When a fifth message of the same flavor appeared in her inbox, Keena shut her computer, tossing her half-empty bowl in the sanitizer as she headed for the door. There was no more time for waiting. She needed to know what was happening.

She took the direct route to Green Tower, ignoring the Guardsmen, maintenance teams, and civilians she passed. It was too early for most of the castle to be up; a few maintenance workers starting an early shift, the night crew doing patrols and equipment checks to ensure everything was up and running by the time the rest of the castle came alive. Hardly any of them so much as glanced Keena’s way.

Green Tower had seen comparatively little traffic during the castle's slow accumulation of passengers. With the Guard taking over Blue Tower and refugees constantly cycling through Yellow--to say nothing of the permanent crew and civilian quarters in the central structure--most of the population saw little need to venture to the last two towers. Certainly nobody lived here, or in Red Tower, the only place on the castle less populous than Green Tower.

That wasn't to say Green Tower saw no traffic at all. There were gardens here, up near the tower's peak, and a number of archives, research labs, a secure conference room Keena had been explicitly banned from for no discernible reason, and various reconstructive machines that weren't better served by being positioned closer to the hangars and facilities in need of repair.

There were also a number of comms bays and offices out here that no one at all seemed to know about. The paladins had no need of them, of course, but neither had they reconfigured this area to put in something more pragmatic. For now, at least, they seemed content to leave it alone to gather dust unless and until they needed to expand their operations.

In the mean time, Keena was more than happy to make use of the space. No prying eyes, no oversight from the paladins and their lackeys, all the time and space she needed to set up shop. And set up shop she had. The hardest part of moving to the Castle of Lions had been ensuring the Accords' operations didn't suffer. She still missed the amenities of the headquarters back on New Altea sometimes, but she'd always been adaptable, and now that she'd gotten settled in here, she didn't mind it.

She certainly didn't miss the unannounced visits from her fellow Councilors.

Keena had chosen the hollowed out remains of an old archive as her base of operations. The outer rooms she left alone to act as a buffer. What was one more dusty atrium with darkened hallways and study rooms leading off? From the main corridor, it would seem abandoned, even when Keena was deeply entrenched in an operation. She'd moved in everything she needed, gathering it from other disused spaces. The computers she already had, though she'd disconnected them from the castle's storage. She didn't need access to the ancient Alteans' archives, and the paladins most definitely didn't need access to her files. The comms array she'd plucked out of one of the disused comms decks, dismantling it and transporting it piece by piece before reassembling it here. This she _had_ hooked up to the network, but by the end of that first day she'd loaded it up with her own security system to keep herself under the radar--and to keep listening ears, both inside the castle and out, away from her calls.

She had seven messages waiting for her when she logged in, clearing three layers of verification in quick succession. She paid no mind to the first of these, a periodic report from an agent stationed on one of Zarkon's warships. It would detail troop movements, battle plans, upcoming targets, and more--important information, but not urgent.

What she was interested in were the reports from her agents scattered around the Coalition. Like other agents, they were informants first, placed to give Keena eyes and ears places she couldn't otherwise access, poised to act but given no instructions to do so. Not yet. Hopefully not ever--but Keena liked to have contingency plans in place long before she saw any real need for them.

She opened the first message and skimmed it, her brow furrowing as she found nothing on the state of Quinna, as she might have expected. No sign that they were finally moving to withdraw from the Coalition, or had laid their doubts to rest and thrown their full support behind the Chettok plan. No word of retaliation from the Empire or sightings of the Vkullor or Dark Voltron or some new threat.

No.

Her agent had been contacted by another member of the Accords. Another member who shouldn't have known that there was an operation on Quinna, much less who Keena's operative was.

Heart pounding, Keena opened the next four messages in turn. Each said the same.

Someone from New Altea was digging for dirt--trying to oust her? Or trying to get ahead? They spoke with the full authority of the Council of New Altea, but that didn't mean much. Anyone with a little creativity and a lot of guts could put on airs; if they had access to the right channels, they could convince her agents they were anyone. It was dangerous either way. These five operatives had all declined to speak and had instead reached out to Keena, warning her of the potential threat. A sixth had sent in a letter of resignation--no mention of the Council, but the timing was too perfect.

Six operatives on six different worlds.

If the Council or anyone else had found them, they must have found others. Others who hadn't bothered to contact Keena. Others who had, at best, gone to ground, digging in to escape the confrontation that was coming.

How many of them had cracked at the first hint of pressure? They didn't have the same training as her operatives in the Empire, after all. They were never meant to stand up to interrogation.

That had been her first mistake, and not one she would soon repeat.

But first, damage control. She had to work quickly if she was going to salvage anything. Her contacts, her codes, the network she had built over a dozen years--that was more valuable than any single agent. She wasn't about to hand it over to anyone, least of all the Council of New Altea. Whatever they thought they were doing, whatever they hoped to accomplish with this flagrant breach of security, they weren't going to get it. Keena was going to lock her network down, and then...

Then she was going to find out who was behind this, and she was going to make them pay.


	21. Dissolution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keith pissed Keena off by standing up to her, and she took her anger out on Karen. Karen and Thace went to Kolivan with a scheme to get rid of Keena. It seems that plan may have finally born fruit...

Keith was barely awake when he left his room. It had been another late night, trying to squeeze just a little more Vkullor research into a day already full of tactical strikes against Imperial supply chains. When his alarm had gone off twenty minutes ago, a very large part of him had wanted to roll over and go back to sleep.

He'd resisted, but he was dragging as he shuffled into the elevator and leaned against the hand rail, his head lolling against the wall as the shiver of machinery threatened to lull him back to sleep.

Keena slipped in behind him just before the door closed, and Keith snapped suddenly awake.

He straightened, holding his breath as she regarded him. His hands dropped to his side, fingers twitching as he resisted the urge to go for his sword. He'd never needed it against Keena before.

She stood in front of the controls, which meant he couldn't let himself off on the next floor to escape. He was stuck in here with her until they reached the third floor--not a long trip, especially with as quick as the castle's elevators were--but longer than he wanted to be alone with Keena.

He'd known he couldn't openly defy her and no expect retribution--and though it had taken some time, it seemed retribution was finally here. Keith wondered what it would look like. A threat? An ultimatum? Maybe she was planning on blackmailing him into doing what she wanted.

For a cold instant as she stared at him, her hand reaching behind her to press a button he couldn't see--something in the castle's lower levels--he thought she might be planning on kidnapping him, taking him away from the castle in the hopes that getting him away from his friends would make him more cooperative.

It wouldn't, and he _would_ fight her before he let her take him anywhere, but as he'd seen every time they crossed paths on the training deck this week, she was a soldier in her own right. Maybe that was why he kept finding her there; she was trying to intimidate him. It wouldn’t work.

She just went on staring at him, though, her face a blank mask, her eyes uncomfortably intense as the silence thickened between them. Keith's eyes darted to the display above the door where the floors were ticking by, rapidly closing in on the number three. He would have to make a break for it when the doors opened, and if she tried to stop him, he'd call for help. Shiro, Matt, and Allura were all early risers and were usually finishing their breakfast around the time Keith arrived each morning. If Keith was loud enough, they might hear and come running.

Heart pounding, Keith counted down the last three floors and gathered himself to run.

Keena moved first, and Keith froze. For all he'd braced himself for this, for all he'd swore he would fight her tooth and nail--sword and _dagger_ , at that--she moved, and all he could do was hold his breath, every inch of him rigid as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed the sensitive patch on his temple just before his ear where the fur was thinner and the brush of her lips raised chills down the length of his spine.

"This isn't the end," she whispered, her voice wavering. Was she _crying?_

No.

She pulled back, smiling a tight smile, and Keith realized it wasn't tears that was making her voice shake.

She was _angry._

She gripped his shoulders, her claws digging in just enough to hurt, and ducked her head to catch his eyes.

"You hear me? I'm going to fight this, kitka. They won't take me away from you."

The doors slid open with a soft whir, and Keith glanced toward them, readying himself to barrel past Keena and out into the open. Before he could, however, she stepped aside, smiling, her arms wrapped around her waist. She made no move to stop him as he darted out of the elevator, spinning once he was free to be sure she wasn't coming after him.

She wasn't.

She stayed where she was, half-visible inside the elevator, staring at the far wall with fury slowly pulling her face taut. The door slid shut a moment later, cutting them off, but that didn't help the shaky, queasy feeling in Keith's gut. If she hadn't already done something, then she would soon. Keith had no clue what, but it couldn't be good.

He wasn't hungry anymore, but he turned for the kitchens anyway, hurrying off in search of Matt.

He would know what to do.

* * *

"I can't believe you went behind my back to get me a day off," Meri said, trying and failing to look disappointed as she cradled the mug full of hot chocolate Rosa had just given her. She lifted it to her face to breathe in the wisps of steam coming off it, and scowled harder as she caught Rosa smiling at her.

"I did nothing of the sort," Rosa said. "All I did was ask my son if he would be okay without you for a day."

Meri rolled her eyes, but she couldn't fight the smile that tugged at the corner of her lips. "You're the worst at being responsible." They both still wore their pajamas, and Meri doubted they'd be changing out of them any time soon. Rosa had the whole day planned, it seemed, though she wasn't saying anything to Meri. She'd been waiting outside Meri's room this morning--waiting for her alarm to go off so she could knock without waking Meri up but still catch her before she got dressed.

Then they'd retreated to Rosa's rooms, a slightly nicer suite than what any of the paladins had taken, with a small sitting room attached to the three bedrooms--one each for Luz and Mateo in addition to the master. There was also a kitchenette with a single burner and a prepper, the Altean equivalent of a microwave. Rosa had started the hot cocoa at once, using her family's recipe. (Which really wasn't fair; she knew perfectly well that Meri couldn't resist a mug of Rosa's cocoa.)

"You remember that time you called Lance out sick just to spend the day with him?" Meri asked, pulling her feet up onto the sofa.

Rosa smiled. "You needed it."

" _I_  needed it?" Meri asked. "I'm not the one who lied about my son having a fever."

Rosa's smile widened. "I don't remember you complaining, either."

Meri gaped at her, smile turning into an incredulous laugh as she reached one foot out to kick at Rosa. "This is slander," she cried. "A blatant attack on my reputation, and I won't stand for it."

Shaking her head, Rosa sipped her cocoa. "I suppose you're going to try to claim today was for my benefit as well, then?"

Well. Meri didn't have an answer for that. She settled into her blanket pile, glowering at Rosa and spite-drinking her cocoa as Rosa all but preened at her cleverness. 

"I'm doing better, you know," Meri said sullenly.

Rosa's smile softened into something far too sympathetic for Meri to face head-on, and she turned her eyes to the rest of the room. It was small and spartan, like most of the castle's living quarters, but Rosa and Ramon had made it feel like home. Pictures on the walls--many of them brought from Earth, a few taken in recent months--and trinkets on the shelves and nightstands, a hand-made blanket folded neatly at the foot of the bed and another pooling in Meri's lap.

This room felt more like home than Meri's.

Then again, Meri never had learned how to let herself settle.

Rosa leaned forward and took Meri's hand in hers, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "I know you are. I'm not scared for you the way I was when you first came back to us."

Meri flinched back, staring into her mug as Rosa held tight to her hand. It was true; Meri had spiraled and spiraled _hard_ when she first got back from Keturah's inner circle. She knew that, and she knew her friends were right to have worried for her. She'd had a lot of low points in her life, but that had been one of the worst, and there had been moments she'd resented everyone who helped keep her afloat.

But they _had_  helped. Allura and Coran with their quiet support and constant presence. Thace with his understanding and his unassuming offers of tea and a break from duty. Lance and Val and Nyma with their solidarity--in the lion and out of it. Blue herself, and Rosa, too, though both had let Meri come to them rather than chase her down. Other people had done plenty of chasing.

Other people like Akira, who had always somehow managed to find her when she most wanted to be alone--and somehow, had always managed to make her feel better regardless.

But if Rosa had given Meri a sick day because of Akira, then she was going to have to be the one to broach that subject. It was hard enough to look at Red most days; Meri didn't think she'd spoken about them, or about Akira, once since they'd returned from Oriande.

Thankfully, Rosa didn't seem inclined to turn today into a counseling session. She just gave Meri's hand another squeeze, then started an Altean crime show playing on the projector. It reminded Meri of simpler days, when she and Rosa had settled in with a bowl of popcorn and a rainbow of nail polish and spent the day watching CSI while Ramon took the kids out after school.

Meri would never admit it, for fear of giving Rosa the ammunition she needed to meddle like this more often, but it was nice. Spending a day away from the war. Mostly away from the war. She couldn't totally stop herself from wondering what the others were doing, and how they would fare without her. It was still early, but Allura and Shiro would be handing out the assignments soon. Another episode, and Meri would have missed her chance to be there.

Maybe once that decision was out of her hands, she'd finally be able to relax.

Luz came darting into the suite halfway through the second episode, chirping a distracted hello to Rosa as she disappeared into her room. Edi lingered in the doorway, her ears all the way back and a nervous smile on her face while she waited for Luz to return. Meri grabbed a fresh handful of popcorn and blinked at Edi while she ate it, amused by the way Edi squirmed.

"Bye, Mom!" Luz called, disappearing as quickly as she'd come with a bundle in her arms. "Edi, come on!"

"That wasn't weird at all," Meri muttered after they'd both disappeared out the door. The episode still played on the wall opposite them, but Meri was well and truly distracted.

Rosa shook her head. "She's been like that a lot recently. Always in a rush to be somewhere else."

"Always with Edi, too?" Meri asked. "They didn't used to spend a lot of time together."

"They didn't," Rosa said. "But they've been practically inseparable the last two weeks or so. It's good she's made a friend. She spent so much time alone when we first came here, I was starting to worry. Especially after everything that happened with Keturah."

Meri grimaced. She'd noticed the changes, too. Back on Earth, Luz had always been a boisterous girl, if not an especially social one. She had friends, but she was just as happy to spend time on her own. Since Keturah's AI made its move, though, she hadn't been independent so much as withdrawn, shrinking away from everyone and always lost in her own head.

"She seems more confident lately," Meri said, turning to gauge Rosa's reaction. "More like her old self."

Rosa nodded. "I'm happy for her. But you'll forgive a mother for wondering what it is her daughter is always running off to. She doesn't talk about it, whatever it is she does with Edi. I almost want to ask Edi about it."

"She'd probably crack sooner than Luz."

"But I don't want Luz to feel like I'm invading her privacy. She doesn't seem to be getting into trouble, and from everything I've seen, Edi's a very responsible young woman. I can't imagine she'd let Luz do anything dangerous."

Meri snorted. "I think Edi would combust on the spot if they were doing anything wrong. They're just having fun."

Rosa nodded. "That's what I think, too. So I shouldn't pry." Still she stared at the door, like she wanted to chase after them.

Meri held out her hand for Rosa's mug and went to get them both some more cocoa. She supposed they were going to have to distract each other today.

* * *

"The diplomacy seems to be going well," Karen said, straightening her notes as Shiro and Allura joined her and Coran at the table in one of the smaller conference rooms. "I haven't heard any talk of withdrawing from the Alliance for almost a week now."

"Except for the Kimmavari," Coran said.

"The Kimmavari aren't serious about leaving," Allura said, massaging her temples. "They recognize that they've already made themselves a target by taking a stand, and withdrawing would only leave them more vulnerable to retaliation. They're only making a fuss because they like it when we pay attention to them."

Shiro's grimace said he'd paid entirely too much attention to them for his liking.

"Still," Karen said. "Posturing aside, it seems you've quelled most of the fears."

"For now," Shiro said. "A lot of the work we've done is contingent on finding a way to take down the Vkullor. Until we do that, we're at an impasse with more than half the Coalition." He looked up at Karen, the bags under his eyes more pronounced than ever. "I don't suppose either of you have anything new to report on that front?"

Coran grimaced. "Nothing substantial as of yet. We've torn apart the footage we have just about as much as we can." He tapped his tablet and turned it toward Shiro and Allura. It showed a model of a Vkullor, highlighted in shades of yellow, orange, and red. "The red areas indicate places where previous fleets have concentrated fire in cases where they actually succeeded in bringing down their target."

"And how much firepower would we need to match those fleets' outputs?" Shiro asked. Coran's hesitation said it all. Shiro sighed. "Anything else?"

"Pidge and Matt have some theories on other vulnerable structures," Karen said. "You only catch glimpses of them in the footage, if they're visible at all, so they'd be very difficult to target, but the last set of literature the Olkari sent us mentions specialized structures in the gullet that account for most of a Vkullor's destructive potential. They also mention Quintessence sacs--concentrated pockets of Quintessence found in most Destroyers."

"Destroyers?" Shiro asked.

"Colossal creatures who live in open space," Allura explained. "Vkullor and Weblums were the first to be identified, which is what gave the creatures their names, but there are a handful of others, like Balmera."

Karen nodded. "Exactly. You know how Balmera concentrate Quintessence in crystals? Other Destroyers do the same thing."

"Weblums' stomachs are lined with Quintessence sacs," Coran said, nodding. "They discharge them to fire a powerful beam, like a massive laser cannon, to break down dead worlds for feeding. Scaultrite is the byproduct of that process."

Shiro folded his hands beneath his chin. "And these Quintessence sacs--they're a weak point?"

"Only in that a large portion of the Destroyer's Quintessence is stored in concentrated pockets, rather than evenly distributed throughout the body," Karen said, glancing at Coran. "You can kill anything if you drain enough of its Quintessence."

"And it takes time to renew these stores," Coran said. "A Balmera needs years to grow a new crop of crystals without an influx of Quintessence, and even Weblums, who store an excess of Quintessence in their gut, can only fuel a few attacks at a time."

Allura rested her chin in the palm of her hand and tapped one finger against her cheek. "So we can chip away at it, is what you're saying. Destroy a few Quintessence sacs in each battle, and eventually we'll wear it down."

"Only problem," Karen said, "is that no one has actually identified a Vkullor's Quintessence sacs. Everyone agrees that they must be there; Vkullor are too big to survive with a conventional Quintessence flow. But it's not like anyone's ever dissected a Vkullor before."

Shiro made a face. "And that's all we have? Hypothetical Quintessence sacs and weak points we'd need to hit with everything the Coalition has and then some?"

"That's all." Coran nodded. "The Olkari should have another update for us tomorrow."

"Okay," Shiro said. "I suppose we'll come back to the question of the Vkullor tomorrow, then."

Allura laid her hand on his arm and offered a sympathetic smile. "In the mean time, we've heard reports of what sounds like robeasts attacking the Lyuvin Galaxy."

"Robeasts?" Karen asked, lifting her head. "Or lions? We haven't seen ordinary robeasts since New Altea."

"We're not sure," Shiro said. "That's why we want to take the whole team out to investigate. With any luck, it'll be--"

The door to the conference room hissed open, and Karen turned toward it, idle curiosity immediately drowned out by a flood of adrenaline that had her shooting to her feet, her hand darting to the small of her back, where her knife was hidden underneath her sweater.

"Keena," Allura said more civilly than anyone else in the room likely would have been able to manage. "I'm sorry, but this is a closed meeting. If you need something--"

" _You,_ " Keena growled, her eyes narrowing as they fell on Karen.

Karen stood her ground, drawing a neutral mask over her face like she was in the courtroom. She couldn't afford to show her fear. "Has something happened?"

“Has something _happened_?” Keena asked, incredulous. “You stab me in the back, and you have the _nerve_ to ask if something _happened_?”

Karen breathed, reigning in her mind before it could go charging down paths of wishful thinking. “I’m sorry, Keena, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Keena stormed forward, and Karen's hand tightened around the hilt of her knife. She almost drew it; the sight of an angry Galra, even a comparatively small one like Keena, bearing down on her was almost enough to make hear break and run. She didn't, though, and Keen slammed a tablet down on the conference table. A glance showed that she had her memos open, but Karen wasn't inclined to take her attention off Keena long enough to read the small text.

“You know full vrekking well what I’m talking about. Somebody convinced the council of New Altea to launch an inquiry, and you’re the only one with a grudge against me big enough to pull something like this out of your ass.”

Satisfaction uncurled in Karen's chest at the mention of an inquiry, but it was quickly put out as Keena leaned into her personal space.

"You can’t fool me, Holt. This is your doing, isn’t it?"

Karen took a small step back, conscious of the space around her, and of the table and chair that had her hemmed in, Keena blocking her clearest path to escape. "Do I look like a councilwoman of New Altea to you, Keena?" she asked dryly. "I don't have the authority to start an inquiry, even if I wanted to."

Keena moved faster than Karen could track, reaching for her throat, and for a fraction of a second, Karen forgot all about the others in the room. She forgot about the knife at her waist, a weapon she'd hardly trained with. Keena moved, a growl humming in the air, and Karen reacted on instinct.

She stepped to the side so Keena's hand missed her throat. At the same moment, Karen planted her palm against Keena's sternum and brought her inside leg around and hooked it behind Keena’s, sweeping her feet out from under her. Karen bore her to the ground, dropping to one knee as Keena's back hit the floor. Karen's hand never left her chest, her thumb and forefinger following the lines of Keena's collarbones--not constricting her airflow, but in a position to do so if the need arose.

As her free hand closed around the hilt of her knife and began to draw, Karen suddenly became aware of the room again. Shiro had vaulted over the table, stopping short once he realized Keena was already on the ground. Allura and Coran, too, had moved to intervene, Allura drawing her staff, Coran curling his hand around the back of a chair, like he meant to beat Keena over the head with it.

They all froze as Keena wheezed in a breath. She seemed stunned, and not just physically. _Good_ , Karen thought with vicious satisfaction. Keena should have seen a basic take-down coming-- _she’d_ trained Karen to do the very same thing long before Thace took up the mantle of teacher. But she’d let her rage blind her, and Karen wasn’t going to fuss about that.

Allura coaxed Karen away from Keena before hauling the woman to her feet, maintaining an iron grip on her arm all the while.

"What is the meaning of this?" Allura demanded. "Attacking an adjunct of Voltron--I should have you thrown off the ship for this!"

Keena spat her hair out of her mouth and laughed. “What, are _you_ on the council now? Last I checked, you were only the ‘princess’ of a dead world. You’re certainly not _my_ princess--you have no authority over me.”

“But you are on _my_ ship,” Coran said, taking a step forward. His hand fell off the back of the chair, and he picked up the tablet Keena had slammed down on the table. “And I’ll have you respect myself, my princess, and my crew while you’re here--I'll certainly not have you attacking them. Karen may not have wanted to pursue the matter last time, but I'm afraid I can't ignore it any longer.”

Keena gave Karen a bitter glare. “She told you about that, did she? Did she also mention that she _stabbed_ me?”

“Considering the way you came at her just now?” Shiro said, drifting closer to Karen, like he was afraid Keena was going to break free of Allura’s grip and finish what she’d come here to do. “I’m inclined to believe she had good reason.”

Keena snarled, but whatever she was going to say was cut off as Coran made a curious sound, something like a laugh and a scoff in one. Karen turned to find him scanning the memo Keena had brought up on the screen of her tablet.

“It says here you have orders to return to New Altea at once. You’ve been relieved of your post?”

Keena’s face darkened. “Suspended. Standard procedure during an inquiry like this.” Her ear swiveled toward Karen, though her eyes never left Coran. “I don’t know _what_ lies you fed the council, Holt, but I _will_ clear my name. And whatever damage Zarkon does in the mean time is on your shoulders.”

“We’ll handle Zarkon,” Shiro said. “You worry about yourself.”

Keena’s lips twitched. “Oh, I will.”

Her eyes returned, then, to Karen, who stiffened, her hand going once more for her knife.

“Contain yourself, Keena,” Coran warned. “Do I need to have the Guard escort you to your ship?”

In an instant, the rage was gone, shuffled away beneath a placid mask. Keena straightened, standing as regal as she could with Allura’s hand still tight around her arm. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be out of your hair within the hour--and I’ll be back as soon as the inquiry is over.”

“I’m sure you will,” Coran said. He nodded to Allura, who released Keena. Keena brushed her sleeve, tugged on her jacket to straighten it, and stormed out the door without another glance at any of them.

The instant the door closed, Coran was at the comms panel on the wall, slapping a button so hard Karen felt it in her bones. “Layeni,” he barked. “I need you to send some of your men down to the public hangar. Keena should be leaving within the hour. Make sure she does.”

“Yes, Captain.”

A profound silence followed, during which Karen realized she had yet to let go of the knife at her back. She forced stiff fingers to uncurl and breathed to calm her racing heart.

Shiro placed a hand on her arm. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"That was an impressive take-down."

Karen flushed and turned to Coran rather than find a way to answer. "Thank you. All of you."

Coran raised an eyebrow. "There's no need to thank us. You told me what happened with her before, but even so--to see her like that… Well, it’s for the best that she’s leaving. What _did_ you do to get the council to remove her?"

Smiling, Karen righted her chair and gathered up her notes. "I suppose we’ll have to ask the council what happened, won't we?"

Allura and Coran traded glances while Shiro hid a smile behind his hand. "I suppose we will," Coran said.

Karen settled back into her seat as Coran put through a request for a video call with Kolivan. There was a buoyancy in her chest that had her head spinning and her pulse racing out of control. Was this how her children felt after a battle? Powerful--invincible, even--and drunk on victory? If so, she suddenly understood much more intimately why Pidge had fought so hard to remain on the front lines. Not just out of a sense of duty, not just to protect their friends.

Karen could very easily see this feeling becoming addicting.

The rush of victory couldn’t last forever, though, and as the other three resumed their seats around her and the screen rippled in anticipation of Kolivan’s response, Karen felt something dark and tight growing in her chest.

“That was too easy.”

Shiro gave her an odd look. “What are you talking about?”

Karen shook her head. “I don’t know. Coran, can you ask Layeni’s soldiers to call us to confirm when Keena has left?”

Coran seemed almost as confused as Shiro, but he acquiesced, finishing just as Kolivan himself appeared on the screen before them. The pointed look he gave Karen as he greeted them said he’d been expecting this call.

Karen hardly heard the pleasantries that opened the conversation. She was too busy staring at the comms panel, waiting for the Guard’s call, trying not to acknowledge Shiro’s gaze piercing the side of her head. How could she explain it to him, the way she felt as though she’d just been played? Keena was stubborn and arrogant and slippery at the best of times. Yes, the Council had summoned her, but she’d barely even fought it. Surely she wasn’t just going to go back to New Altea with her tail between her legs. Even if she thought she could talk her way out of this--which, to be fair, she well might do--Karen couldn’t imagine she was eager to stop her meddling in the mean time.

So why? Why storm up here just to go quietly as soon as she was shown the door? Why not fight it? Why not wait until Karen was alone and end her there? Was it fury and spite, blinding Keena to the smart choices? Or was she planning something even now?

Karen knew which she had to assume, and it settled into her gut like a whirlwind of butterflies, plucking at her attention as Shiro, Allura, and Coran pressed Kolivan for an explanation.

When the comms panel lit up with a Guardsman calling to say that Keena had just left, it did nothing to ease Karen’s fears.

This wasn’t over yet.

* * *

Keena was gone.

The knowledge sat heavy in Keith's gut, made his head feel like it was about to float off his shoulders.

He must have misunderstood something; Keena couldn't actually be gone. She wouldn't have left without a fight. She must have been forced out.

They'd passed in the halls, Keena carrying a travel bag and wearing a flight suit designed for long voyages. She hadn't looked at Keith, hadn't acknowledged his presence in any way, and that more than anything had made him worry.

"What the hell happened?" Pidge asked. They'd found him shortly after he'd finally found Matt, and both of them seemed to have already caught wind of whatever had happened--though neither of them had much more information than Keith did. Matt had apparently been with Layeni when Coran called asking for a few of her pilots to go make sure Keena left as she’d said she would, and Keith wasn't honestly sure what Pidge had seen or heard, but by now they'd blown through the castle's public records and were starting to dig through the restricted files in search of an explanation.

One thing was clear, though: Keena had been expelled from the castle-ship, her name, clearance code, and personal ship ID added to the extraordinarily short list of people who were to be barred from entering the castle in the future, regardless of the reason for their visit.

Keith had the horrible feeling that this was his fault. Several of the paladins had noticed his anxious mood the last two weeks, and he'd confided in Matt and Shiro about his confrontation with Keena. Karen had overheard some of it, too, and a more general version had likely worked its way around the team by now. Any one of them might have decided the best thing was to get Keena out of the castle for good.

But what happened next? Keena wasn't going to just roll over and take this. So she'd been banned from the castle; that still left her the entire Coalition, not to mention all her connections and resources on New Altea. She was going to hit back sooner or later, and it was going to be Keith's fault.

He should have kept his damn mouth shut.

Pidge had their laptop out and resting on their crossed legs, and they leaned back on their hands, considering the plethora of windows they had up on the screen. Pidge had pulled the other two into the nearest lounge as soon as they'd found them. It was small and quiet and, most importantly, private. Keith and Matt had claimed seats on the room's one couch, Pidge foregoing the two armchairs and instead shoving the small table aside to make room on the floor.

Matt poked the top of their head. "No hacking."

They tipped their head back and scowled. "I never said anything about anything."

"You were thinking it, though. You can't find answers, so you're just going to have to look harder, right? Maybe get into the security feeds, see if you can find the moment it all went down?"

"You know if you went to a security node you could do that _without_ the hacking, right?" Keith asked. "Paladin credentials give you access to basically everything."

"Yes, but that would involve walking," Pidge said, turning back to their computer.

"So you admit you're thinking about hacking, then," Matt said.

"I admit nothing. Oh, look. Someone called New Altea not too long ago. Secure call. Must have been important.”

Matt gave an exasperated huff. " _Pidge._ "

They tipped their head back again. "You want me to bring it up?"

Pursing his lips, Matt fought the urge to say yes. Keith could see it in the way his eyes kept darting to their computer screen, and Keith finally took pity on him and leaned forward to peer over Pidge's shoulder. "Yes."

A few clicks, and Pidge had the feed up--Shiro, Allura, Coran, and a very distracted Karen in one window, Kolivan in the other.

"I'm sorry," Shiro was saying. "I'm just a little confused as to what changed so suddenly. Don't get me wrong; I've seen that Keena can be difficult to work with. Considering her line of work, she obviously prefers to work in the shadows, and it doesn't exactly breed trust. But the council sent her here as their representative. Your endorsement was the entire reason we welcomed her aboard. If you're going to revoke that endorsement, I think you at least owe us an explanation."

Matt gave up all pretense of moral objection and leaned forward, his shoulder brushing Keith's. "Wait, this came from the council? I figured she finally pissed Shiro or Allura off to the point that they sent her packing."

Keith had assumed the same, but this new information did nothing to settle his uneasy stomach.

Kolivan regarded the others in silence for a long moment before finally nodding once. "You have a point. We received a tip several days ago suggesting that Keena might not have the Coalition's best interests at heart. We investigated, and what we discovered was... concerning."

"Commander Kolivan," Allura said, straightening her spine and folding her hands at her waist. "I understand you do not wish to compromise the identity of the one who tipped you off or any others who cooperated with your investigation, but we need more than vague impressions. What, exactly, has Keena been doing?"

"Nothing, yet," Kolivan said. "At least, nothing we can find proof of. But she had agents embedded in almost every government we looked at--registered agents of the Accords, yes, but more often outsiders she hired for these jobs, with no ties to our government. In no case did she report her activities on allied worlds to the council, seek our approval or advice, or report back about her progress. Furthermore, many of the planets on which she had the strongest presence have voiced concern with the way the Coalition is being run."

Shiro's face darkened. "She's driving people to leave the Coalition?"

Kolivan shook his head. "Perhaps. We think it more likely she seized on these planets as weak points she could exploit. At least one of her agents who agreed to speak with us says he was told to gain the trust of local leaders, but to keep them on the fence about the Coalition--to sow fear and distrust, but to argue against leaving, at least for now."

"To what end?" Coran asked. "What does she get out of such an arrangement?"

"A network of worlds who would fall in line with the new Empire," Keith muttered. Pidge and Matt turned toward him, and he ducked his head. "She wants to claim Zarkon's throne, right? That means she needs to make sure she can hold it. It does her no good if the Coalition turns against her."

"And to all these worlds that are afraid of Zarkon's retribution," Pidge said, nodding along, "a friendly Empire sounds like a safer bet than open revolution."

"Whatever Keena might have said, we have not yet formally removed her from office," Kolivan said. "She is suspended, pending the conclusion of our investigation, at which point we intend to summon her for a formal hearing. She will have a chance to clear her name.”

Karen turned then, finally seeming to notice the conversation going on around her. “Didn’t you say you had no proof she’d done anything wrong? She’s just going to talk her way out of there and get right back to what she’s been doing.”

“I would not be so quick to pass judgment,” Kolivan said. “Keena’s tongue may be silvered, but she has few friends on the council. She will need to do more than talk in circles to clear her name.”

“Of course,” Allura said, her face souring. “She’s _asothra._ ”

"The Spymaster of the Accords is frequently _asothra_ ," Kolivan said evenly. "They are permitted to appoint their own leaders, and they usually choose those with the most experience. Keena's birth alone is no reason to remove her."

“Would the other councilors all say the same?” Allura asked. “Don’t misunderstand me, Commander. There is no love lost between myself and Keena, and if she has done what it seems she has, I will be glad to see her stripped of office. But I don’t want it to be on account of her birth. That sets a dangerous precedent for your people.”

“I agree,” Kolivan said. “But keep in mind, we have only been investigating Keena’s activities for two weeks. The hope is that we will find something more before it comes time for the trial. I would convict her on the merits of her actions, not on personal grievances and the prejudices of certain individuals.”

Keith’s stomach was tying itself in knots by now, and the matching unease on Karen’s face captivated him. What did she know--or suspect? Kicking Keena off the castle-ship was a recipe for disaster, her spite and vindictiveness sure to lead to retribution, but if she'd lost most of her resources, surely there wasn’t much she could do. _If_ she had.

Shiro seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "If she has her own agents on these worlds, how can you be sure she isn't still giving them orders?"

"She contacted them through official channels," Kolivan said. "Treated them like full agents despite them never having gone through our vetting process. We appointed an interim Spymaster from among the upper ranks of the agency, and ey have already delivered new orders to all agents on non-authorized assignments. Keena is to be considered a rogue agent, and any orders they receive from her are to be reported back to the acting Spymaster. We are monitoring the situation."

No one looked particularly happy about that, but at least it was something. The closer they watched Keena, the more warning they would have when she made her next move.

"There you are."

Keith jumped, spinning toward the sound of Karen's voice behind him. Pidge shut their laptop with a snap, crossing their arms over top of it and curling their fingers around the back of it as they looked up at their mother with false innocence.

"Mom! What are you doing here?"

Karen stopped between steps, lifting her eyes from her tablet. She frowned, then sighed. "Pidge, we've talked about this. Just because you _can_ crack secure calls doesn't mean you should."

"I'm looking for holes in our security!" Pidge protested. "If I can get in, that means Haggar can, too. I'm doing this for our own good."

Karen rolled her eyes. "How much do you know?"

Pidge pressed their lips together, but considering Karen was their adjunct, there was really no point in trying to hide anything. Keith saw that at once, and Pidge hesitated only a moment longer before they sighed. "Keena might have been conspiring against the Coalition, so the council of New Altea launched an investigation and removed her as Spymaster--"

"Temporarily," Matt interjected.

"Temporarily removed her," Pidge agreed. "Coran had the Guard make sure she left the castle, though I'm not exactly sure why; he didn't seem to know about the conspiracy until just now--"

"That's plenty Pidge, thank you." Karen placed a hand on their head to quiet them, then sat in one of the armchairs, her tablet in her hands. She still seemed nervous, perhaps even more than she had on the video. "We need to be careful moving forward. It’s very likely Keena will try to retaliate for what she perceives to be a personal attack. We need to be ready for whatever she tries."

"Kolivan's already handling that part," Matt said. "Right? They cut Keena off from her agents, put someone else in charge, and they're watching all the planets she had people on. What else are we supposed to do?"

Karen shook her head. "I’m not sure we _can_ do anything else on that front, at least until we see what Keena’s going to do next. But I was thinking of a different sort of retaliation." Her eyes fell on Keith, who instinctively shied away, both from Karen and from Matt and Pidge, who swiveled to look at him.

"What do you mean?"

"How much do you know about New Altean law?" Karen asked.

Keith made a face. "Basically nothing? I spent all of a week there."

She nodded. "I figured. That's why I went ahead and took a look. The age of majority varies from culture to culture, after all."

Matt's face darkened. "But Keith's never lived on New Altea."

"And he would be considered an adult by now even if he did," Karen said, holding up her hands. "That's not at issue here. But while I was researching the age of majority on New Altea, I happened to find an article on parental rights. Normally I wouldn't be concerned about anything that's in there--New Altea traditionally fosters a closer relationship between parents and their adult children than what you might see elsewhere, it’s true. Parents have some legal responsibility for their children's debts and are expected to help raise grandchildren, and in exchange, adult children take on a share of their parents' medical expenses, and their parents can block or even void certain contracts." She pressed her lips together. "It's nothing that would affect you normally, but there are enough gray areas that Keena might be able to exploit a loophole."

“Loophole?” Keith asked, already dreading the answer. “What sort of loophole?”

“Well… for example...” Karen tipped her head to the side. “Keena might try to claim that the paladin bond qualifies as a contract, and that as your mother she has the unilateral right to void it--not that she’d ever win a court case with that argument,” she added quickly. “But she might try it just out of spite.”

Keith's mouth ran dry, and he jumped as Matt shifted closer, putting an arm around Keith's shoulders like he expected Keena to jump out from behind the unoccupied chair to try to steal Keith away.

"How do we stop her?"

"On this front?" Karen waved her tablet. "It's a fairly straight-forward bit of paperwork." She caught Keith's eye. "You don’t have to do this. I want to make sure you understand that. Like I said, whatever Keena tries isn’t likely to stand up to scrutiny, so we can deal with it as it comes. This is just an option to consider. I understand if you need some time--"

Keith held out his hand.

Karen frowned, but handed the tablet over. She already had a digital form pulled up--a form from the New Altean government site, with a heading at the top of the page. _Dissolution of Familial Bonds._ Below that, an official seal of some sort, and then a checklist of information he would need to complete the form, with a little green button at the bottom prompting him to begin.

"This isn't a small step," Karen said softly. "I understand that. I don't want you to feel like this is your _only_ option. As long as you aren't physically on New Altea, there's very little she can do to you, and I’ll personally help you deal with anything she does try. This is just a way to preempt the attempt."

It was much more than that, though, wasn't it? This wasn't just a way to block Keena's inevitable retaliation. He'd told her once that she wasn't his mother, but he got the impression that she didn't buy it. Maybe this would make her see that he was serious.

"I want to do it," he said. "But I don't know if I have all of this information. I don't have a government ID."

"You do, actually." Karen came to sit on the arm of the couch beside him, taking the tablet back to open a memo app with a list of information--including both Keith and Keena's ID numbers. "She apparently registered you under her address the first time you came to New Altea."

"Because that's not weird," Pidge muttered. "Don't you normally wait until the person actually, I don't know, _moves in_? Or at least tells you they want to move in?"

Keith snorted. "Since when does she care what I want?" He tapped back over to the form and clicked the start button before looking up at Karen. "Could you help? I want to make sure I don't miss anything."

She smiled, dropping onto the cushion beside him as he scooted over to make room. "Absolutely."

* * *

Thanks to Karen's guidance, filling out the dissolution form was a quick and mostly painless process. In less then twenty minutes, it was done. Keith tapped the button to submit with less a sense of relief than one of finality. He'd expected to feel lighter for having cut Keena out of his life in some tangible, recognizable way, but instead, he felt empty. Drained, like he'd served up his heart and soul in that form and gotten nothing in return.

At least it was done.

Soon after, Shiro and Allura called them all together to check out reports of a robeast sighting on the edge of the Coalition, and Keith didn't have any more time to wonder why he didn't feel more satisfied.

"You did the right thing," Matt assured him as they prepped for the mission. "If all she's gonna do is demand things from you and make you feel like shit when you don't listen, you have every right to cut her out of your life."

Keith knew Matt felt far more strongly about it than that, and was only holding back out of some sort of misguided conscientiousness, like being too personally involved in this might piss Keith off.

Red chose that moment to join them, and the usual muddy emotional resonance between them snapped in to stark clarity. They were close enough to the lion for the bond to almost fully crystallize, and Matt's own relief suddenly swept over Keith, far outweighing his own. It was like Matt was more enthused about getting rid of Keena than Keith was--and Keith didn't hold that against Matt. He _should_ be glad. Keena had been nothing but a drain and a storm cloud hanging over Keith for as long as she'd been around, and Keith should have been overjoyed to be free of her at last.

It was just the knowledge that she was too stubborn to give up so easily that was putting a damper on this small success. It was just that cutting her out meant admitting, once and for all, that she'd never been what he'd hoped she would be.

It was just that getting rid of her wasn't what he really wanted, and he knew himself too well to deny it.

The bond, of course, went both ways, and Matt's high spirits came crashing down--not just because of Red's arrival, but because of whatever he saw in Keith's thoughts.

Keith settled his helmet over his ears and gave Matt a curt nod. "We should get going. The others are probably waiting by now."

Red joined them as they headed for the lion, Keith in the lead. He told himself to focus on the mission at hand. Keena was Keena, and she would be no different tonight when they returned from the fight. He could worry about her then, when his team didn't need him to be at the top of his game.

* * *

Hours passed, and Karen still felt as though she couldn't breathe properly. Unease simmered inside her, waiting on the slightest provocation to flare up and consume every ounce of her attention. She kept waiting for something--what, she didn't know. A nasty surprise Keena had left behind, her returning with thunder and fury, _something._

She shouldn't have pushed Keith to go through with the dissolution. Did she honestly think Keena was going to try something with the parental rights laws? They were more than a little archaic already, and rarely enforced. Surely Keena's revenge would come from something that wouldn't get her laughed out of any courtroom she tried to sweet talk. It was just Karen being paranoid and seeing threats on all sides.

Even when she wasn't on the castle-ship, Keena was messing with her head.

Well, it wasn't _just_ paranoia, was it? Karen had a very good reason to want Keith to legally expunge Keena from his life, only it had nothing to do with his safety and everything to do with what Karen herself wanted. And that was even worse than acting out of paranoia.

It took less than an hour to regret telling Keith about that form--to regret mentioning Keena's parental rights at all. Keith was vulnerable right now, more so than usual, and he trusted Karen perhaps more than she deserved. She should have reassured him that everything was all right, not given him something _else_ to stress over.

She couldn't very well take it back _now_ , but she had to be more mindful of herself in the future. Take her time, think things through before she did something else selfish.

 _Keith_ was what mattered here. As long as he was happy, she was satisfied.

And even as she kept telling herself that, she found herself back in her room, pen and paper before her, contemplating her next step and wondering if it was selfishness or something else driving her forward.

* * *

There _were_ robeasts in the Lyuvin Galaxy, as it turned out--the first Keith had seen since New Altea, with the exception of the Dark Lions themselves. These ones were noticeably weaker than most. Smaller, too. No one was sure if they were early prototypes, dragged out of storage to serve as fodder and distract the already thin-stretched paladins, or if Haggar had turned control of the remaining robeast labs over to other druids, who were starting to churn out cheap knockoffs.

It was frighteningly effective, whatever they were doing. These new robeasts were hardly more than an inconvenience to the lions, but they still had the firepower to decimate cities without a significant military presence to defend them. Which was most of the Coalition, to be frank. Those few who could mount a large enough army to fight one off would have to keep it posted at home to be of any use.

They had to find the rest of the robeast labs and shut them down, or they were going to spend the rest of this war chasing the creatures all across the universe.

It was yet another concern to add to a mountain that was already daunting, but Shiro and Allura assured the paladins they would look into options and discuss it at the next all-team strategy meeting, due in two days.

Eight hours after they'd left, with more than a dozen robeasts down for the count, the paladins finally returned to the castle-ship and choked down a meager dinner before dispersing to their rooms or whatever entertainment could be found.

Keith's fatigue had climbed steadily all day, compounding with the inexplicable hollow feeling that had chased him since filing the dissolution form that morning. He parted ways with the other paladins immediately after dinner, heading back to his room for a shower. He'd probably end up going to bed early and hope he'd shaken this weird funk by the time he woke up.

His plans were slightly derailed, however, when he found an envelope waiting for him on his bedside table. His name was written on the front in neat, round letters, and the flap was sealed shut.

Keith frowned at the envelope, picking it up and turning it over. He'd come across these things in Matt's memories, of course--mostly useless trash that went straight in the bin without even being opened. He'd never actually seen one himself. Paper was as rare as it was frail in the Galra Empire, only used by the most pretentious of officers or in rare and ancient tomes. Keith had collected a few physical books only because their subject matter had been so mundane no one else wanted them, and otherwise he'd never so much as touched a sheet of paper. He'd never needed to, when digital memos and archives were so much more convenient.

He wondered who on the castle not only _had_ paper to spare, but would bother to waste it on Keith. One of the humans, presumably, but with the paladins out for most of the day, the list narrowed sharply.

It occurred to Keith that he could discover who had left the envelope by simply _opening_ it, but he hesitated. There was something pristine about the envelope as it was, and a few cautious tugs proved the adhesive was too strong to simply peel back. It seemed an awful shame to ruin it.

He left the envelope on his bed while he showered, but seeing it a second time only magnified his curiosity, and he eventually gave in, hooking his claw under the corner of the flap and ripping it open in a series of uneven strips. The end result looked like something that had been flayed alive, and he grimaced as he pulled the contents free. There were three pages, neatly stacked and folded in thirds. The first was a hand-written letter addressed to him, with two typed pages beneath.

His eyes caught on a single word, repeated half a dozen times on each of these two pages, and his breath halted in his chest. Sitting on the edge of his mattress, he turned his attention back to the letter.

_Keith,_

_I've tried a hundred times to find the right way to start this letter, but no matter how I try, it always comes out wrong. Words can't capture what you are to my family: the way you brighten our lives with your presence, the way I've come to think of you in the same breath as Matt and Pidge. I hope you'll believe that I'm not exaggerating when I say that you've become like a second son to me. Now that I've met you, I can't imagine a life without you, and I know Matt and Pidge feel the same._

_You may already know that I've been working with the Coalition on adoption law for the last few months. I've tried to tell myself that it was a selfless pursuit, that I was only working with the faceless orphans of the universe in mind, but that's not true. For quite some time now, I've wanted to ask you to be a more formal member of our family. I've wanted to be for you what Keena failed to be, to show you the home and the family you've always deserved._

_I've agonized over when and how to tell you, and part of me can't believe I'm putting this in a letter. It feels so impersonal. But Keena has pressured you time and time again to do what she wants, and I could never live with myself if I did the same, however sincere my intentions may be. The last thing I want is to make you feel as though you need to give an immediate answer, or to agree only because you don't want to offend me. I promise you, you can ignore this letter, and things will continue as they always have. I haven't mentioned this to anyone else, and I won't bring it up again unless and until you do. If adoption isn't something you are interested in pursuing, this will be the end of it. You have my word._

_I've included with this letter a few short resources, which I hope will answer any immediate questions you may have. What adoptions means, what the process looks like... things like that. You can find more information in the castle's archives, or you can ask me. Please, take as long as you need to consider what you want to do. I know things have taken a drastic turn with Keena's departure today, and you may not know what you want. Truth be told, I've gone back and forth with myself over whether or not it's right of me to even bring this up so quickly, and I want you to know that there is no expiration date on my offer._

_You are already part of this family, Keith, and you always will be. If you ever decide you want to make that official, whether it's tomorrow or two years from now, we would love to have you._

_I'm always here for you, whatever you ultimately decide._

_Karen_

Keith stared at the letter in his hands, as breathless as though he'd just fought off an entire army on his own. His chest felt simultaneously like it was about to cave in and like it had been stuffed so full it was about to burst. His eyes burned, and he reached one shaking hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose to stem a sudden tide of tears.

This.

This was what he'd been missing, what he'd expected to feel after kicking Keena to the curb. This release, like the rush of breath he'd been holding too long, like changing out of armor after a long and grueling fight. This sense that something had been out of place and had finally fallen into place. This sense of _rightness_ he usually only felt when he and Matt were perfectly in sync.

Belonging.

Maybe it had never been about Keena at all.

Maybe he'd just wanted something better.

He glanced at the other pages Karen had included for him--the first a bulleted list of what adoption was and what it was not, of what it could do, what it couldn't do, and what was up to him to decide. The second was a step by step outline of the process. He couldn’t focus long enough to read either, beyond skimming the first few lines to determine what it contained. He was more moved by their mere inclusion, anyway. Karen didn't have to do that, to go out of her way to give him information on what he could expect, to make the whole idea that much less intimidating.

If he'd been able to hold onto a single thought through the rush of emotion, he probably would have devoured every word of it.

But he couldn't focus on trivial details like how many forms needed to be filed and how long it would take to get a response. He couldn't focus on anything except the energy burning its way through is body, hot and restless and battering down the doors of his composure.

He stood, still clutching the letter, and burst out into the hall, only stopping when the low lights and relative silence reminded him that it was getting late. A sudden panic seized him, and he ducked back into his room, closing the door behind him while he checked the time, lest anyone catch him in the hall and ask him what he was doing.

It was just after nine--not as late as he'd feared. A small handful of the earliest risers might already be in bed, but Karen was probably still up, wasn't she? She had to be.

Keith wavered, his hand hovering over the door controls, Karen's letter clutched to his chest. His heart was pounding harder than it did before battle, and he would have laughed at himself if he wasn't so angry. This shouldn't be this hard. Karen had never been anything but patient with him. She'd even told him in the letter that she was always there for him. He should just... go.

Of course it wasn't that easy. He banged his head backward against the door a few times, growling at the empty room as he tried to work up the courage to try again.

He glanced down at the letter pressed to his chest, the careful loops of Karen's handwriting, all the little signs of how much thought she'd put into this letter. With a deep breath, he hit the door controls and left his room, storming toward Karen's room on the other side of the elevator and knocking before his courage ran dry for a second time.

Instantly, he wanted to run. Turn tail and sprint back to his room. If he was quick, he might even make it before Karen opened the door.

Or maybe she wasn't even in her room. Maybe she was down in the archives, or up on the bridge helping Coran with something. Maybe Pidge or Matt had needed her for something. There were a thousand reasons she might not be in her room right now--

The door opened, and Keith’s heart dropped. Karen was dressed in pajamas, a thin gray sweater pulled on over the top. Her hair was mussed slightly, like she’d been laying down when he knocked, and the only light in the room was the warm glow of Karen's bedside lamp, a personal touch she'd acquired during a stop on some trade world.

He’d woken her up. He should have known. Karen was up almost as early as Shiro most days; of _course_ she would go to bed early. He should have waited until tomorrow.

He opened his mouth to say as much, but Karen smiled as she caught sight of the papers in his hands.

"Keith," she said, and it was so soft and so fond that it brought tears to Keith's eyes all over again.

"Yes."

There was more urgency behind the word than he meant for there to be, and Karen stopped in the middle of what had the feel of a reassurance. He didn't know what she thought, seeing him on her doorstep disheveled and teary-eyed and shaking like a newborn skild, but whatever impression she got, Keith was pretty sure it was the wrong one.

"Yes?" she asked. She was breathless now, too, and Keith breathed out a halfway little laugh, suddenly self-conscious. But for the first time all day, he knew exactly what it was he wanted, and he was going to seize it in both hands.

" _Yes._ " He looked down at the letter in his hand and tipped it toward her, though she must have already realized what it was. "I don't need any time to think. If you meant what you said here, then... _yes._ "

She smiled, and there was more pride--more _love_ \--in that smile than he'd seen in Keena in the last year.

"Okay," she said, reaching out for him like she was afraid he was going to melt away. "Then--come in, and let's get started."


	22. Vkullor's Bane (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... The paladins have been searching for some way to defeat the Vkullor, but even with the Olkari helping, they haven't made much progress. Meanwhile Keena's scheming and jealousy finally went too far, and Karen pointed the Council of New Altea toward her latest plot. It proved evidence enough to recall Keena pending a formal inquiry into her activity. Keith officially dissolved their family ties, and afterwards Karen adopted Keith.

The paperwork ended up taking longer than Keith had expected, maybe because he kept stopping to marvel at the fact that this was happening at all. Karen Holt was adopting him. _Had_ adopted him now, though she warned him that with the Coalition adoption system just getting up and running, there was no telling how long it would take to process their application. His new ID might be issued tomorrow, or it might not come through for several weeks.

Keith didn't care about the ID. (Well, he did, because entering _Keith Holt_ into the change of name form had felt like some sort of heist, and seeing it on an official holographic ID might make him feel a little less guilty.) What mattered was that Karen wanted him. She'd hedged about the name change, assuring him that he didn't need to do it to be part of the family.

She didn't realize that if there was anything he'd hated more than having Keena for a mother, it was carrying his father's name around with him everywhere he went. Not wanting to get into that viper's nest of old memories, he'd said, simply, "I didn't like my old name anyway."

It was late by the time they finished, nearly midnight, with the promise of another early morning waiting for them. Karen had waved off his apologies, kissed his forehead, and sent him off to bed.

As though he could sleep after this. His forehead tingled where her lips had touched his skin. His arm still felt warm where she'd brushed up against him as they leaned over the tablet. He was running on adrenaline, heart trying to beat out of his chest, head spinning with the enormity of what he'd just done. He climbed into bed and spent the next hour staring at the ceiling, an arm flung over his face to hide his smile.

He was a _Holt_ now.

Somehow, eventually, he managed to fall asleep, but morning came too soon. He groaned at the blaring of his alarm and smacked it until it shut up, debating the merits of going back to sleep.

As soon as he remembered last night, the rush returned, and his eyes flew open. Suddenly the lack of sleep didn't seem to matter quite so much, and he threw back the blankets, making it three quarters of the way through his morning routine before it occurred to him that he still needed to tell people.

Well. He didn't _have_ to, and part of him shied away from the notion of saying anything at all. But mostly he _wanted_ people to know. If seeing the name Keith Holt written down made his heart dance, he could only imagine what it would be like to _hear_ it.

Karen was just emerging from her room as Keith reached the elevator, and for a moment elation turned to an anxious buzz as a sudden burst of insecurity washed over him. They'd filled out and submitted the forms last night in such a rush there hadn't been time for second thoughts... What if Karen regretted it?

Her smile, when she caught sight of him, put those fears to rest, and he tentatively smiled back as she joined him by the elevator. "Good morning. Sleep well?"

He nodded, though he really hadn't. It occurred to him that he hadn't thought to ask Karen what he should call her now. She was his mother now (a shiver chased his next breath, and he bit down on a ridiculous grin, ducking his head as he entered the elevator and fought to regain his composure.) Did she expect him to call her Mom?

The word felt foreign on his tongue as he voiced his question, squirming in discomfort as soon as he was done.

Karen turned toward him, her arms folded across her chest. "Well, I certainly won't complain if you do," she said with a smile. "But there's no need to feel bad if you're not comfortable with that. We're still new to this, after all, and I would understand if the word has some less than pleasant associations, given Keena's... I hesitate to even call it a parenting style."

Keith's lips twitched, and he looked up in time to see Karen wrinkle her nose, her cheeks flushed pink. "Yeah," he said. "You're right, and... I don't think I'm there yet. It's not you," he added quickly. "I just--I'm not used to, you know, _having_ someone who... You know."

She caught his face in her palm and gently turned him toward her. "I know," she said, ignoring the elevator door, which chimed as it opened onto the hallway outside the kitchen and dining hall. "It's okay if things are strange or awkward at first, or if you don't know how to feel or what to do. We'll figure it out together, okay?"

It was a simple thing, that promise, and it shouldn't have choked Keith up the way it did, but all he could do was nod as his throat closed up. He dropped his head onto Karen's shoulder, and as she jumped, he realized that maybe she was just as uncertain about this as he was.

It took her barely a second to relax, her arms going around his shoulders and squeezing until he'd put himself back together. He pulled back with a sniff and wiped his eyes. "Thank you," he said. "For everything."

She smiled back, and something about the smile seemed sad. "You're welcome, Keith."

She seemed to want to say something more, but only shook her head when Keith cocked his questioningly, and they eventually dragged themselves out of the elevator and continued on to the dining hall, where a simple breakfast of fruit, granola, and something Hunk called imitation yogurt--a special sort of food goo--had been set out. Shiro and Matt were already there, along with several others, Matt blinking groggily as he leaned on Shiro and stirred his yogurt-granola mixture.

"Do you want to tell them, or should I?" Karen asked in a conspiratorial whisper as she grabbed a bowl. She must have seen his panic, because she chuckled and patted his arm. "I have some good news," she said, drawing every eye as she headed for the table, Keith slinking along in her wake with a bowl of food he was too nervous to actually eat.

Matt looked up, his eyes slow to focus. "You've discovered an ancient ritual to banish Vkullor from this plane of existence?"

Shiro elbowed him in the ribs, and Matt gave him a deeply offended look.

"Better," Karen said, setting her bowl on the table, leaving a seat between her and Matt, which Keith supposed she meant for him. He moved toward it, but Karen caught him by the shoulders before he could drop into the chair and pretend not to exist. "Say hello to your new brother."

Shock splashed across both Shiro and Matt's faces, changing quickly to delight, as several others around the table gasped. Keith turned to look for them--Meri, he thought, sitting with Allura and Coran at one end of the table, all three of them already done with breakfast; Hunk, who was sitting with his family nearby and quickly transitioned from gasping to cooing.

Matt pounced on him, doing his level best to squeeze all the air out of Keith's body. "About _frickin'_ time," he muttered, laughter bubbling up out of him as he rocked them both side to side. Keith let himself be dragged along with the motion, his face flaming and his ears swiveling in pursuit of every sound in the room.

Keith squirmed out of Matt's hold, breaking into a grin of his own as he caught sight of Matt's. The bright, warm feeling in his chest swelled further as Shiro reached around Matt to ruffle his hair, and he did a poor job of feigning irritation as he dropped into his seat and jabbed his spoon into his breakfast.

Word spread quickly, catching the other paladins as they wandered in and then racing out ahead of them until people were congratulating Keith before anyone had a chance to say anything. Lance stood behind his chair and smothered him in kisses until Keith couldn't help but laugh, reaching backward over his head to wrap his arms around Lance, pulling him down for one real kiss before shoving him toward the food.

But it was Pidge who really stole the show, bursting through the doors with an indignant squawk as they jabbed a finger at their mother. "What the fuck!"

"Good morning, Pidge," Karen said, calmly collecting her empty bowl and standing to take it to the sanitizer.

"You didn't tell me you were adopting Keith! How _dare._ "

Keith stood as they stormed up to their mother and scowled, hands on their hips like they thought they could actually scold her.

"Pidge," Keith began, feeling like he should defend Karen's secrecy but not sure how to begin.

As it turned out, he wouldn't get the chance. As soon as Pidge saw him, they forgot their anger and screeched again, sprinting across the room and leaping on Keith with so much force he staggered backward, kicking his chair into the empty one beside it. His hip hit the table, and dishes rattled, but Pidge couldn't have cared less.

"Holy _fuck,_ " they said, leaning back until all that held them up was their legs around Keith's waist and his hands on their hips. They grabbed his face between their hands and squeezed. "You're a Holt now?"

"Theoretically," he said, his voice somewhat muffled by Pidge's hands. "Is that a bad thing?"

They rolled their eyes, the rest of their head following the motion until their entire upper body tipped back. Keith yelped and tightened his hold on their waist, his panicked mind conjuring the image of them falling and cracking their head open on the ground. Great way to commemorate joining the family, that.

"Of _course_ it's not a bad thing, Keith, what the fuck?" They grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled themself upright again, now grinning broadly. "This makes us siblings!"

"Um. Yes?"

Pidge poked him between the eyes. "That's a good thing, fuzzbutt."

Keith relaxed incrementally, shifting his grip on Pidge so they were settled more comfortably around his waist like a toddler, or the koalas he'd seen in Matt's head. Part of him resisted, still looking for some reason that he wasn't allowed to have this. What had he done to earn a family like this?

Nothing at all.

He didn't have to.

* * *

Allura called the paladins together mid-morning, less than a minute after she wrapped up a call with Ilori and the other Olkari researchers. All she had to do to light a fire beneath their feet was mention the Vkullor. In under five minutes, they'd all gathered on the bridge, some seated, some standing, all of them silent and attentive.

None of them wanted to play around where the Vkullor was concerned.

"We've received another update from Olkarion," Allura said once they'd all arrived. "Andone found reference to an old legend of a world that had some sort of divine protection against Vkullor."

Pidge arched an eyebrow, their feet pulled up on the seat of their chair. "So, what? The key to winning this war is to get some god on our side?"

Coran scratched his chin. "Depending on who you ask, we _already_ have ‘some god’ on our side. Voltron, even the individual lions, have been enshrined in a number of cultures across the universe. I wouldn't discount the veracity of a claim simply because it's regarded as supernatural by those who have passed down the story."

Pidge shut their mouth, suitably chastised, and Allura cleared her throat.

"It's true, the legend itself doesn't give us much to go on," she said. "All the information the Olkari were able to find says that local legends speak of creatures that greatly resemble Vkullor attacking the planet, only to be repelled by the gods. One particularly... vivid legend goes so far as to say the mountains near a prominent city were formed from one such beast's skeleton."

"Those must be some _big_ mountains," Lance said.

Val tapped her chin. "Or a small Vkullor. A juvenile, maybe?"

"No one knows." Allura folded her hands behind her. "It appears a team of researchers from Altea organized an expedition to the planet in question, Klenahn, to determine whether there was any truth to the legends." She paused. "War broke out before they could begin, and the expedition was unfortunately canceled."

Pidge powered on the computer at their station, no doubt digging for information on Klenahn, which was just as well. Allura would have asked them to do the same shortly; they were far more efficient with Imperial records than she was, and she'd already verified that the castle's archives contained even less information than what the Olkari had sent along.

"We're going to investigate," Shiro said, stepping into the lull in the conversation. "The Olkari have a few theories about what might have kept the Vkullor away from Klenahn. If we can get our hands on samples, or if the Klenna people have any new information they can share, we may be able to start on a solid plan for how to take the Vkullor down."

"Yeah, uh... Sorry, Shiro, but I don't think the Klenna are going to be telling us anything." Pidge swiped two fingers across their screen, sending a file to the main display. "Looks like entire population was wiped out about five hundred years ago."

Allura turned to read the reports Pidge had shared--all of them Imperial in nature, as Allura had expected.

"Looks like the Klenna didn't like being colonized," Pidge went on, scrolling through whatever additional information they had at their station. "Someone found some rare ore in the planet's crust, and Zarkon tried to build some mines. Galra couldn't survive on the planet, though, and they were burning through prisoners too fast to turn a profit, so they started capturing locals to work the mine. They staged a revolt, and it looks like the sentries were decimated. Most of these reports theorize that the corrosive atmosphere slowly degraded their circuitry until they just couldn't hold the mines."

"And in retaliation, Zarkon razed the planet," Shiro finished, scowling as his eyes skimmed the screen. "Millions of lives lost for nothing."

Pidge hummed, discontented. "Klenahn is deep in Imperial territory by now, but I'm not seeing any signs of activity in the area for at least fifty years. Klenahn was the only inhabited planet for light-years in any direction, and the borders have long since moved on, so why bother maintaining a base in the area, right?"

"Well, that's one positive," Hunk said. "It's a deadly planet with acid air, but at least we won't have to worry about the Empire."

Allura pursed her lips. "I won't lie; this will be a dangerous mission. We have very little information on the threats we will find, so I'll need everyone on high alert. We stay in our lions until we know what precautions we need to take, and once we're on the ground, we stay in pairs at all times. We'll have check-ins every half hour. If anything seems off--even if you just feel a bit more winded than you think you should be--you let us know at once."

"Hold on," Lance said, holding up a hand. "We're _all_ going?"

"This is the best lead we've had yet," Shiro said. "And without anything more specific than an entire planet to look for, we want to have as many bodies on this as possible. The Guard will be on alert while we're gone, and we've brought in some Coalition forces to supplement them. They should be able to handle anything short of the Vkullor itself or Dark Voltron."

"In which case," Coran interjected, holding up one finger, "you will be getting a shrill and very urgent call to come save our sorry behinds."

Allura snorted, tapping her control panel to activate the holo-projector, which brought up a map of Klenahn's solar system. "We know that this system is unusually rich in Quintessence, and Klenahn itself is quite close to its sun. Surface temperatures run much higher than what any of us is accustomed to."

"How hot are we talking here," Val asked, "on a sliding scale from Death Valley to the surface of the sun?"

Allura pressed her lips together. "Average daytime temperatures hover somewhere around the boiling point of water—although considering the atmospheric pressure on Klenahn is considerably higher than the standard on either Earth or Altea, standing water doesn’t actually boil."

Shiro held up his hands before the wide eyes could progress to open panic. "Our armor is rated for way higher temperatures _and_ pressures than what we're going to encounter on this mission, and the seal and internal oxygen supply will protect us from any toxic or corrosive compounds in the air. The important thing is to keep your helmet on at all times, and report back if any component of your armor gets damaged or stops functioning as expected."

A calm settled over the room as Shiro finished his speech. Allura was struck, for a moment, how far this team had come. Eleven young adults about to head into an unknown and dangerous situation to try to do the impossible and find a way to bring down a Vkullor. She was proud of them, and honored by their trust and loyalty.

Shiro walked them through the flight path he'd plotted for them, paused for questions--there were none, which was fortunate, as neither Shiro nor Allura were likely to have an answer.

Twenty minutes after receiving word of Klenahn from Olkarion, the paladins were on their way.

* * *

Klenahn was an imposing planet; Shiro would give it that much. Its two moons dominated the sky, silent sentinels watching the paladins' approach. They were unusually vibrant for natural satellites--one a vivid pink, the other almost black and glittering in the light of the distant sun. Pidge asked a silent question, waiting for a nudge of approval from Shiro and Allura before breaking off to do some scans.

"High mineral content in both of them," Pidge reported. "But Green's database can only identify about half of these compounds. Some silicates, lots of metals..."

"Are those mines?" Val asked. Shiro closed his eyes and looked through hers, noting the low, squat structures dotting the moons' surface. Heavy machinery sat in clusters--but as Green enlarged the view, Shiro saw that many of these machines were embedded in the ground, like the stone had grown over them since they'd been abandoned.

Shiro frowned. "That's interesting. I thought it was the planet's corrosive atmosphere that put a stop to the Imperial mines. Those moons look too small to have an atmosphere at all."

"They've got a little bit of one," Pidge said. "More than Earth's moon. Look's like the planet's magnetic field extends far enough to shield them from solar winds--same way Saturn shields its moons, just not quite as strong."

"That's a pretty powerful magnetic field," Shiro mused.

Pidge cocked their head to the side, a motion Shiro felt in the bond as much as saw on the comms screen. "You think that's it? Vkullor don't like magnetic fields?"

"I wouldn't jump to conclusions just yet," Shiro said. "But it's worth keeping in mind. Can you confirm that those mines are abandoned?"

"They are. There's not enough Quintessence on either moon to support a flea."

"All right. Rejoin the rest of us, and we'll head down to the planet."

The Green Lion looped around the far side of the dark moon and joined up again at the back of the procession as Shiro took them in. They passed a decrepit space station on the approach. It was difficult to tell much about it at this point, considering it was missing whole sections of its frame, leaving a spherical central hub with three remaining skeletal offshoots. It didn't look Imperial, though, and it certainly wasn't functional. It looked like it had been destroyed in battle, or maybe by a couple of large meteors.

All together, it looked like more had happened here than the records had mentioned. That, and the Klenna were a far more advanced civilization than the impression Shiro had gotten.

Then again, these were Imperial reports they were talking about. Shiro's stint in Zarkon's army had been short, but he remembered Keith explaining to him how the Empire downplayed the cultural and technological achievements of its enemies and its subjects. Military leaders may have had an accurate assessment of the Klenna's potential strength, but anyone else? Not so much. And once Klenahn was destroyed, there was no longer any tactical reason to acknowledge them as competent.

Allura quelled his outrage, reminding him why they'd come. The Vkullor was poised to kill trillions. They had to figure out whether there was any truth to the rumors that this world was immune to the Vkullor's rampage--and if so, they had to figure out how to harness those natural defenses.

The paladins stuck together as they circled the planet twice, scouting for points of interest as they verified the atmospheric data they'd received.

"It's a little hotter than expected," Val reported, "but still within our suits' capabilities."

"Totally different atmospheric makeup from Earth," Pidge added. "I'm seeing high levels of methane, ozone, couple sulfur compounds, chlorine gas--ooh, that's a fun one. I know we already said don't take off your helmets, but, uh... Don't take off your helmets. Chlorine gas is _not_ fun."

Not for the first time, Shiro wondered whether it was really worth the risk to come here. In theory, it should be fine. There was no one here, virtually no chance of the war coming to them. At worst, they'd have to keep an eye out for dangerous animals on the surface, but most of what they'd seen so far was too small to be worrisome.

"Are you looking at these Quintessence readings?" Meri interjected as Pidge started to rhapsodize about the horrors of chlorine gas exposure. "They're bizarre."

Allura called up their BLIP-tech scanner, and Shiro frowned as he studied it. There were wild fluctuations in Quintessence levels across the planet--far more drastic and far more localized than was usual. There were several pockets of high Quintessence--in the forest directly below them, yes. That made sense, as large swaths of the land seemed barren and uninhabited, with the flora and fauna concentrated to a few pockets like this.

But there was also a pocket of Quintessence in the mountains north of the largest intact city Shiro had yet seen, and another under the surface of the sea on the other side of the world. Meanwhile the city itself went beyond merely lifeless; Quintessence levels there plunged far below the baseline seen elsewhere on the planet.

"You think this is the aftereffects of killing off the population?" Matt asked in a low voice. "It would've been too long ago for Haggar to have her planet-killing super-weapon ready yet, but maybe she tried the same thing on a small scale. Drained the cities of their Quintessence, killed all the people living there, and hunted down the survivors one by one."

"That is horrible," Shay whispered.

"But effective." Nyma's unease resonated in the air around Shiro, sharp-edged and itching to get in there and do something. "On the bright side, it doesn't look like they bombed this city. We might be able to salvage some information."

"All right,” Shiro said. “You three want to investigate the city, then?"

Lance nodded. "On it."

"We'll take the mountains," Hunk said. "There's something... weird about them--and not just the Quintessence. You see that big ol' cavity in the middle there?"

Shiro switched scans and saw that, indeed, there was a cavern larger than the entire city deep in the mountain range. The Quintessence spike seemed to be localized over the northern end of it.

"Plus, isn't that mountain range supposed to be a dead Vkullor?" Pidge pointed out.

Hunk shivered. "Don't remind me."

"Sorry." Pidge didn't sound all that sorry, and they tapped their screen, sending a readout to Shiro. "There's some sort of radiation I can't figure out coming from all these different places," they said. "We're going to go check them out."

"And we'll head for that forest, I guess," Matt said. "You never know what freaky plants and animals might be in a place like this."

"Freaky enough to take down a Vkullor at range?" Meri asked.

Matt threw up his hands. "I don't know. You think a _cave_ killed the Vkullor?"

"All right, that's enough," Allura said. "Right now, we need information. It doesn't much matter what sort. Anything could be useful, or not. For now, let's just learn what we can. We can sort through it all later."

Shiro nodded. "All right. You all know what you're doing. Keep us up to date, and call for backup if you run into any sort of trouble. Allura and I are heading back up to orbit to check out those mines and the space station we passed. I want to know what sort of defensive capabilities these people had. We'll be staying in Black so we can keep apprised of each of your situations, just to be safe. We'll check in in thirty minutes."

There was a chorus of acknowledgments as the other lions split off, each headed for a different target. Shiro hoped at least one of them found something useful.

* * *

Hunk had feared, as they approached the mountain range north of the city, that he and Shay had bitten off more than they could chew. The mountains weren't massive when compared to, say, the mind-bogglingly gargantuan range that split the continent on Olkarion, towering so high they cleared the atmosphere and then some. But they were still _mountains_ , and it could easily take days to search every slope for a cave mouth or tunnel entrance that might take them to the cavern they'd seen on the scans. They had to be close to see anything small like that, anyway.

On a hunch, Hunk started their search in the foothills closest to the city. There was nothing to say the cavern was man-made--but then, there was nothing to say that it was actually accessible from outside at all. Besides, these people had been advanced enough to build their own space station. Odds were good they'd noticed the hole in the mountains even if it was natural, and curiosity, if nothing else, would have been a powerful magnet.

They got lucky. The Klenna _had_ build something--a landing pad some way outside the city, partially camouflaged and set into a valley so that it would be invisible from a distance at ground level. A narrow, winding road led into the mountains, and--after some hunting--they found another landing pad at a base almost directly over the southeastern point of the cavity. Shay set them down on the landing pad, and Hunk triple-checked his helmet's seal before he ventured outside after Shay.

"What do you suppose this place is?" he asked her, gawking at the buildings as they passed. Even decrepit and decidedly beyond the point of structural integrity, they stood a little taller than what Hunk was used to. Doors were nine or ten feet tall, with each floor closer to fifteen. Not that most of these buildings were taller than a single story. A tower at the corner of the landing pad, a storehouse--or something like it--on the opposite side of camp. Mostly this place looked like a pair of dormitories, a couple administrative buildings, and a garage filled with vehicles--a few with wheels, mostly without, few larger than two seats and a cargo area behind. Every one of them was covered in dust, rusted beyond recognition and in some cases crumbling away to nothing.

"I would say mining," Shay said slowly, peering over Hunk's shoulder into the garage. "Except there is no heavy machinery. Perhaps they keep it all in the caves?"

"Maybe." Hunk frowned. "Could be an exploratory mission, I guess--Klenna, not Galra. Looks like they were trying to stay off the Empire's radar."

Even as he said it, it felt wrong. This place was too well established for a people just discovering the cavern. They'd already explored it far enough to decide that _something_ down there was worth the time, effort, and money it took to build a permanent camp like this.

He glanced at Shay. "I guess we'll never know unless we head in."

She nodded, and they made their way to the tunnel entrance. It was marked by a huge arch made of a type of metal Hunk couldn't immediately identify. Nothing as ordinary as iron or steel, it was a pinkish-orange color with a strange iridescent finish that messed with Hunk's eyes as he approached, and it had stood the test of time better than whatever the vehicles in the hangar were made of.

Shay paused beside the archway, pressing her hand against it with a frown. "They have infused this with Quintessence," she said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Out of curiosity, Hunk pressed his hand to the opposite side of the arch, but he couldn't sense anything. "Is it dangerous?"

She shook her head. "I do not believe so. Perhaps it was a way for them to make their constructions stronger. If we find any machinery made of this material, we should take caution. It could likely power itself if the metal is still infused. Otherwise, we are most likely safe."

Most likely. Sure. That didn't mean Hunk wasn't glancing over his shoulder every few steps as they headed underground. The whole first stretch of tunnel was lined with that iridescent coral-colored metal. It made the ceilings feel higher and the tunnel smaller all at once--a trick of the light and an effect of the latent Quintessence, he supposed.

Nothing attacked them, though, and they found an elevator at the end of the tunnel, its frame, rails, and motor made of the same metal, and also infused with Quintessence. As Shay had suspected, it ran perfectly. The metal wasn't sentient (of course it wasn't sentient; that was just silly) but Hunk couldn't help projecting hostility onto the elevator, which screeched and groaned as it descended an impossibly long, dark shaft. Whatever lamps may have illuminated this shaft at one point, they were long dead now, and the only light was Hunk and Shay's headlamps, slowly sweeping stone walls.

The minutes ticked by, and the elevator kept descending. By the time it hit ground and they stepped off into a long, dark tunnel, it was just about time to check in. Hunk opened the channel early, keeping his mic muted for now, and let the static wash over him as he forged ahead.

"Sure is creepy down here," he muttered, shivering as he twisted his head this way and that to try to trace out the shape of the tunnel. It was deceptively short, the ceiling not quite low enough for Hunk to hit his head, but low enough that he kept feeling as though he had to duck.

In contrast, the tunnel was remarkably wide--so wide their headlamps couldn't chase away all the shadows, but left dark pockets where the ground turned rough. Hunk couldn't fathom the purpose of a tunnel like this--too short for most heavy machinery, several times wider than the elevator. Was this a natural formation?

"All right, paladins, sound off."

Shiro's voice startled Hunk even though he'd been expecting it, and he tripped over a chip in the ground.

"We are here," Shay said, smothering a laugh. "We have found a passage underground and are following now. Nothing to report yet."

"Same here, basically," Meri said. "We're in the city. Haven't found any neon signs pointing us to useful information, so we're basically just wandering around. It's kinda boring, actually."

"Keep looking," Shiro said. "I know it's a longshot, but if you can find an intact and functional computer, there's no telling how much we could learn. Pidge, Val, how's it coming on your end?"

Pidge hummed. "Collecting data. I don't know what to make of it all just yet; I'll have to analyze it when we get back to the castle. I figure if I just survey as many places as I can, odds are better I'll get something useful."

"Okay. Keith? Matt?"

"Hiking through a jungle," Keith deadpanned. "A thorny, rocky, bug-infested jungle that's so thick with toxic gasses I can barely see anything except a blank sheet of yellow."

Hunk stopped walking. "That's probably the chlorine gas; it's dense, which means it tends to settle in valleys and other depressions in the landscape. Have you checked your armor lately?"

"We're _fine_ , Hunk," Keith said.

"You say that now," Hunk said, "but what happens when you can't breathe and your eyes are fermenting in acid, and none of us is close enough to come save you?"

There was a moment of silence that, oddly, helped settle Hunk's nerves. Silence meant the others were taking Hunk's warning seriously, which meant they might actually be careful for once in their lives.

Eventually, Shiro cleared his throat. "I'm sure it won't come to that, but... Go ahead and do a quick inspection, just to be safe."

Keith grumbled, but he and Matt did as they were told, reporting back with fully functional suits after just a few moments.

"Okay. Allura and I are still keeping an eye on all of you, just in case, so go ahead and keep doing what you're doing. We'll check in in another thirty minutes."

The line disconnected, but Hunk hardly noticed; he and Shay had finally come to the mouth of the tunnel. The space opened up here, ceiling soaring away into darkness and the path before them pitching downward. Straight ahead, Hunk's lamp burned on and on, slowly fading in the darkness without hitting any landmark or obstacle.

Something on the walls closer to the tunnel caught the light, though--gemstones, or raw minerals, or maybe something man-made; it was difficult to tell. They glittered all around him like stars... or eyes. A million tiny eyes of some massive beast watching as Hunk and Shay stepped into its lair.

* * *

The city was... unremarkable.

Big, yes, but Nyma had seen plenty of big cities in her travels. After a certain point, they all started to look the same. Big, fancy buildings, big fancy statues, designated nature areas--at least, that was what she assumed the glassy basin they'd stumbled upon was. There wasn't much nature to speak of, not in the way of plants and animals--a few prickly shrubs, a nest of the buck-toothed serpentine scavengers they'd already encountered a dozen times in abandoned alleys and looted stores. Mostly the basin was filled with oddly-shaped rocks. Not carved, as far as any of them could tell, just... aesthetically pleasing, by someone's definition.

She amused herself for a time speculating about the looting. The Imperial records made it sound like a swift end, and most of what they'd seen agreed with that story. They'd found jewelry and damaged electronics and vehicles scattered around the city in silent memorial, many of them fallen in stores and parks and homes. No bones, not after so many centuries, but Nyma was under no illusion that the people of this city had escaped alive. They’d just been going about their lives when they were struck down.

Still, some of them must have survived the initial attack, had come in from other towns, or else had enough advanced warning to try to gather supplies to hole up or to make a run for it. The stores that had been obviously looted--smashed windows, barren shelves, sometimes a few open, empty containers left on the ground--were for the most part those selling basics: food, fuel, clothing--especially the sturdier sort. Large, delicate, and frivolous goods had been all but ignored, and remained--intact otherwise--in their own dusty shrines.

"So," Lance said. "How's the bushwhacking?" An indicator flashed in the corner of Nyma's visor, indicating he'd opened a call to the red paladins. Apparently ten minutes of silence was too much for him.

(Given the state of this city, Nyma couldn't blame him.)

She joined the call as Keith let out an irritated growl.

"That good, huh?" Lance pushed on a door that sat at an angle on its tracks. It stuck for a moment, then toppled, and Lance cringed at the racket.

"It's slow going is all," Matt said. He was obviously making an effort to sound more cheerful than Keith, but his frustration bled through. "We keep having to hack our way through, or pick a different direction altogether." There was a clang, and a grunt. "What kind of plants are these, anyway? I swear they're made of titanium or something."

Lance ducked into the building he'd opened up, waving his hand to clear the dust in the air and peering into open doorways as they passed. So far closed doors had been their biggest barriers. The city was without power, so any doors that had been closed when the city was wiped out were still closed, and it wasn't always as simple as pushing them open. They could have cut through them with the bayard, or siphoned some of their armor's power to resurrect the mechanism, but the former took too long and the latter could only be done so many times before they started to compromise the armor's life-support systems.

And so, they wandered.

"At least you get to enjoy the scenery. We're stuck in a massive ghost town full of dead people dust." Lance's boot crunched on something as he entered the next room--a glove as frail as an autumn leaf, disintegrating under Lance’s foot. The glove--what remained--still clutched a glass disc. Lance stumbled back, swallowing. "I don't suppose you guys wanna switch?"

"You know I _would_ ," Matt said. "But I think getting out of here might actually be the death of me."

Keith snorted. "You're just grumpy because Red won't stop hovering."

"Red?" Nyma asked. "She came with you?"

"They stayed with the lion," Matt said, a little too quickly. "Doesn't mean they're not still with us in spirit."

Nyma shook her head. She understood their discomfort with the way things had gone down with Red and Akira, but she'd spent a little time with Red here and there over the last few weeks. She was trying. She was. It was just difficult to strike the right balance between giving her paladins space and mending bridges.

Whatever. Now was certainly not the time to get into that mess, doubly so over the comms. Ideally, she wouldn't get into that mess at all, but the last few weeks had seen no progress whatsoever. Matt still couldn't walk into the same room as Red without working himself up into a rage--and Keith seemed to be hoping that if he ignored the problem, it would just go away. He didn't get angry at Red like Matt did, but he didn't try to talk Matt down, either. Whenever the topic of Red came up, he shut down, withdrawing into himself and staring at nothing until Matt stopped raving and the conversation moved on.

The silence stretched as the search pushed deeper into the building. Nyma wished she could say they'd chosen it for some particular reason, but the truth was, she couldn't tell this place apart from anywhere else in the city. It was just that this way had been open.

They did find a computer eventually--found several of them, in fact. This city was hardly in the dark ages; they'd had a defense system in orbit, from the looks of it. Not that that had stopped the Empire from taking over. You could probably open up any one of these buildings and find a half dozen computers within the first five minutes.

With no power to the city and the rest of the planet abandoned for five hundred years, however, they couldn't count on a network connection. They couldn't count on there _being_ a network to connect to anymore. Which made it all the more of a dice roll. What had these people stored off-line, and would any of it be at all useful in the fight against the Vkullor?

Probably not. But Lance hooked up his armor to the screen lying haphazard on the desk, settling into the dusty chair beside it as his armor restored power to the computer.

After just a moment, the edges of the screen lit up, and it sprang up off the desk, swiveling in midair until it was facing Lance--albeit nearly a foot above his head. Scowling, he tugged it down, adjusting the angle for comfortable viewing as the system started up.

Several hundred years on, and it performed admirably. It was maybe a little slow to start, but it kept working and eventually booted up to the home screen, where cheery yellowish swirls chased their tails across the screen, the light entirely too garish to be comfortable.

"All right," Lance said, clicking on icons apparently at random just to see what secrets they held. "What have we got here?"

The answer, as it turned out, was, "Not much." Or at least, not much they could make sense of.

"Hey, Pidge?" Lance asked, glaring at the computer screen and opening up a ninth window of incomprehensible glyphs. "I don't think your program likes the Klenna language."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I can't read any of this crap." He leaned forward, squinting at the writing, like that might make it magically turn into something legible. After a moment, he glanced back at Meri and Nyma, who were watching over his shoulder. Nyma shook her head, and Meri reached forward to tap the screen before shrugging her surrender. "It's like it's not even trying to translate."

Pidge hummed. "Are we sure this language exists in the universal tranlsator's database?"

"I'm sure it does," Meri said. "Even if that research expedition never made it here, someone obviously compiled their legends and stories--and the Empire had a colony here for who _knows_ how long. Whatever language or languages they spoke, they had to have been added to the database somewhere along the line."

"Maybe it's only the spoken language that got added?" Val suggested. She seemed distracted, her voice a little hollow, like she was trying to tease apart another problem at the same time. "I mean, the universal translator doesn't automatically translate text at the best of times, so I imagine the catalog of languages is pretty slim."

"And this doesn't look a thing like any writing system I've every seen," Nyma added. "Pidge's program might not even recognize it as text."

Pidge was silent for a long moment, and when they spoke again, it was with a note of indignation, as though they considered it a personal affront that their text translator had its limits. "Copy over whatever you find," they said. "I'll look through it later and see if I can't crack the code."

"I don't think it's a code, really," Meri began, but Pidge cut across her.

"Ah-tah-tah. Whatever. Just upload the data to your suit's internal memory."

Lance frowned. "Yeah... these things don't have any ports I can see, and whatever network they're on, I don't think it's compatible with Altean tech."

Pidge let out an irritated little growl. "Then mark your position and I'll come take a look when we're done here."

"I've got a better idea." Nyma reached over Lance's head and plucked the screen out of the air. It powered down once it was out of range of Lance's armor, and Nyma tucked it under her arm. "There we go. Problem solved."

Lance stuck his tongue out at her. "Smart-ass."

"Sorry. Next time I'll let you bash your head against a wall for a while longer before I point out the obvious solution." She smiled as he rolled his eyes--but he grabbed another small device off the floor by the one-time corpse and tucked it into his belt. From the size, Nyma would guess it was a communication device of some sort, but that didn't mean it wouldn't have interesting information on it, potentially.

Honestly, anything they grabbed was a crap-shoot. Might as well increase the odds of some of it not being garbage.

They explored the building a little further, but most of the other doors were closed, so they didn't waste time forging ahead. Instead, they returned to the street outside, where Lance used his jets to help him scale one of the smaller buildings. It wasn't much of a vantage point, but it was something, and he turned a slow circle as he surveyed the city.

Suddenly he flung out a hand, pointing somewhere to the north. "There."

"What is it?" Meri asked.

Lance jumped off the roof, slowing his fall with his jets just before he hit the ground beside them. "Hard to say, but there are a couple of buildings that look different from the rest of the city. I'd bet anything it's Imperial."

"Colonial government, maybe?" Meri asked.

Nyma crossed her arms, her finger tapping against the edge of the screen she still held. "Either that or a military base. With as toxic as this planet is to outsiders, I'm not sure how Zarkon ever planned to run this colony."

"They'll probably have useful information, though," Lance pointed out. "And we should be able to read and download whatever we find there. Pidge has been hacking Imperial systems for over a year; they've got it down to an art at this point."

Nyma shrugged, and Meri nodded, and they struck out toward the base with Lance in the lead.

* * *

"Any idea what this stuff is?" Val asked, her eyes darting between the monitors that showed scattered pockets of radiation and the landscape below. Aside from being barren and jagged and wrapped in a heavy yellow-tinted atmosphere and altogether unpleasant to look at, it didn't look like there was anything _wrong_ with it.

Pidge hummed, carrying them in a wide arc around another point of concentrated radiation. "They're radio waves, I think, but I have no idea what's causing them. Basically nothing on the planet has any power, so if there are transmitters of some sort down there, they shouldn't still be transmitting."

Val frowned, letting her mind follow Pidge's down the tracks of their thoughts. "Could they be naturally-occurring?"

"I'm not going to rule out the possibility," Pidge said. "If only because this is not at all an Earth-like planet, but... I don't know. Most naturally-occurring radio waves come from, like, lightning, or from stars and other astronomical objects. It shouldn't be _this_ localized and _this_ consistent if it's natural."

Tipping her head to the side, Val studied the hills below them. "Then again, we were expecting this place to be weird in some way, if the legends about the natural Vkullor-repellent are true."

Pidge wrinkled their nose. "Would a Vkullor really be turned away by radio waves, though? Sure, they're _super_ concentrated, but they're not harmful. Everything I'm seeing is non-ionizing radiation. It's not like Klenahn is blasting unwary Vkullor with this level of gamma radiation or anything."

Val shrugged. "Maybe Vkullor have radio vision. You know, like how snakes have infrared vision? Maybe looking at Klenahn is like staring at the sun."

It wouldn't be _particularly_ helpful if that were the case. Not like if they'd found something that actually could kill a Vkullor. But it was something.

"Everyone, check in," Shiro called, his voice crackling on the comms. Val frowned, wondering if the radio waves were causing the interference. The others checked in one by one, each of their voices cloaked in static--but none more than Hunk, who Val could barely hear over the blare of white noise.

"We're fine, too," Pidge said, also frowning as they tapped the comms panel. "Little bit of static on our comms, but that might just be the radiation."

"It's not dangerous, is it?" Shiro asked.

Pidge shook their head. "Just radio waves. There doesn't seem to be any information encoded in them, even. At least, not anything Green can process as information. I'm taking some recordings just in case. There's one more big one I want to check out. Looks like it's near the cavern Hunk and Shay went to."

"All right," Shiro said. "Go check it out. If you finish before the next check-in, join me and Allura up here. We're scoping out the mines on these moons, but I wouldn't mind getting some eyes inside the space station."

"Roger that," Val said, flicking a salute even though they weren't using the visual feeds at the moment. Shiro and Allura would be able to see it anyway, thanks to the bond.

Pidge circled the hot spot once more, recording a few more seconds of radio waves, and then took off for the mountains north of the city.

* * *

Lance had been right; the building he'd led them to was, in fact, Imperial. Meri could tell that as soon as she saw it for herself; the Empire had a very distinctive architecture, and it stood out even more here on Klenahn, where the buildings were asymmetrical and made of some sort of coarse metal that seemed to have been treated to look more like rock.

This building was even darker than usual for the Empire, nearly pitch black. With the thick, almost opaque atmosphere giving the sky the look of an impending tornado--yellow and overcast and lower than it should have been--there wasn't even any light to reflect off the building to make it seem brighter.

It just sat there, a heavy black block dropped in the middle of the city. Whatever it's official purpose, it was there to intimidate, and Meri imagined it had done its job well, though it didn’t seem to have held up as well against Klenahn’s climate as the local architecture.

"All right," Lance said, coming to a stop across the plaza from the Imperial HQ. "What do you suppose is the best way in? I don't want to cut down any more doors than I have to."

Meri tapped her chin, making a show of studying the building before giving up with a shrug. "Flip a coin?"

Lance gave her an unimpressed look and sighed as Nyma struck out across the plaza, her rifle up against her shoulder like she actually expected to run into trouble here. Considering the way their missions usually went, Meri couldn't really blame her, but it did make for an odd picture.

Especially when she slung her rifle over her shoulder, popped the cover off the pad beside the door, yanked out a few wires, stripped them, and touched them together. Meri frowned, ready to ask Nyma what she was doing... And the door slid open with a quiet groan.

"How'd you do that?" Lance demanded, sounding about as offended as Meri felt.

Nyma looked up, adjusting her rifle's strap as she blinked innocently. "It's really quite simple if you know how a basic door control is put together."

Lance crossed his arms. "You know that's not what I meant."

She giggled, leading the way inside. The base was dark, but lights flickered on at their approach, vents rattling as the air cycler powered up. "You really think the Empire would use the locals' power grid to run their equipment? This place runs on Quintessence for sure. I figured it was even odds there was still a little juice left in the conduits, and it turns out I was right."

Meri could have kicked herself for not thinking of that. Of course the Empire used Quintessence. She could sense it in the walls--far more than she'd sensed anywhere else in the city, though that said more about just how empty this city was than anything.

They proceeded deeper into the base, poking their heads into rooms as they passed. It wasn't a large building--bunks for a dozen people, sentry bay that had once held perhaps a hundred. There were only two left, both of them spewing their insides across the floor, as though they'd been in the middle of repairs when shit went down.

The dormitories and the sentry bay took up the majority of the base; mess hall, bathrooms, and showers another large chunk. That left only a handful of rooms for conducting the business of the occupation: a small comms bay, two conference rooms, a room full of monitors that must have been a security station, and a single, small office.

"All right," Lance said. "Let's see if we can start downloading whatever data's left on these computers, then we'll dig through the office and barracks for anything else of interest."

Meri got the transfer started in the security station while Lance and Nyma started the search in the barracks. In contrast to the building's exterior, which was corroded and flaking away, the inside had fared better. Meri noted an extra hum in the air that might have been some sort of atmospheric regulator, which made sense. At least a few Galra had been stationed here, and they couldn’t have withstood this atmosphere any better than humans or Alteans. They would have wanted to be able to take off their armor in here--to shower and sleep, if nothing else.

That had preserved the electronics better than Meri had honestly expected, and it took practically no time at all to insert a data chip and begin a full dump of everything on the server.

Once it was running, Meri joined the others in the barracks. They found a few more personal devices that they added to their stash to look over later, a lot of clothes and weapons that had long since expended their charges. No signs of the people who had been stationed here. Meri didn’t know if that meant they’d escaped the fall of Klenahn, or if they’d died in the street like everyone else.

They moved on, sweeping the entire base room by room. They found little, but the data transfer was going to take time, and they had nothing better to do.

Twenty minutes later, they finally came to the solitary office at the back of the base. It was small, dark, and cramped, with shelves on one wall lined with mounted crystals and glass plates etched with names and dates. The accolades of an Imperial middle-manager, it seemed. Meri poked at these while Nyma prodded the walls for hidden buttons and Lance went to the computer on the desk.

"Uh... guys?" Lance stood frozen behind the desk, his expression obscured by the reflection of the display screen off his mask. Meri glanced at him, and her heart sank as she noticed the frantic motion of the lights reflected there. He turned, the reflection cleared, and their eyes locked.

Meri was already moving, darting over to Lance's side. A countdown flashed on the screen. It was already down to less than two minutes.

"Shit," Meri said. "What is it?"

Lance shook his head. "I don't know, but we must have triggered it somehow. When we came in, or somewhere in all our searching. There's no way it's been counting down for five hundred years and we just happened to show up right before that timer hit zero."

So it was some sort of defense protocol. Great. Meri looked up at Lance, then caught Nyma's eye across the desk. "Grab the drive from the other room," Meri said. "Lance, if there’s anything portable that looks useful, grab it. We've got ten seconds."

Nyma sprinted out into the hall before Meri was done speaking, and Lance dove for the shelves on the far wall--the only piece of furniture in the room beyond the minimalist desk. Meri switched her comms to open frequency. "We've got a little bit of an issue here," she said, scouring the room with one last glance. There was no time to look for hidden compartments or make a copy of this drive, and Lance didn't seem to be finding anything in the far corner.

"What's wrong?" Allura asked.

"Some sort of defense system at Imperial HQ." Meri spotted Nyma in the hall and gestured to Lance, who abandoned his search at once. "We're not sure what it does, but it looks like a countdown started when we got here. We're clearing out, but I don't know what sort of defense system we're looking at. Might want to be ready for a quick getaway just in case."

Meri could feel Allura at her shoulder, devoting her full attention to the situation for a moment before she said, "Okay. We're ready to move in if we have to."

They rounded the corner onto the hall that passed down the line of dormitories. The exit was just up ahead, and by Meri's estimation, there were sixty seconds left on the timer, easy.

The door slammed shut when they were still fifty feet away. Meri slowed, her heart skipping a beat as a second _thud_ echoed through the corridor.

"No!" Lance roared, summoning the bayard and ramming the tip of his glaive into the seam of the door. The blade sank in by a good four inches before it stuck, and Lance couldn't lever the door open or cut through the metal, even as he threw his full weight against the shaft. Allura's presence returned in force just as Lance deactivated the bayard, its light flashing bright as the hallway plunged into darkness.

Meri's headlamp switched on automatically at the same moment that Lance and Nyma's did the same, but it was the flash of the bayard activating once more that made Meri shield her eyes.

"Get back!" Lance shouted. There was a muffled _whump_ , the pale blue pulse of one of Lance's goo bomb, and the next thing Meri knew, Lance was towing her by the elbow into the nearest dormitory, where he flipped the bunk on its side and dragged Meri and Nyma down behind it.

Seconds later, an explosion rocked the building--larger and louder than she’d expected. From Lance’s vehement curse, it was larger than he’d _intended._ The armor diffused the worst of it, but it still hit Meri’s ear drums in a crushing wave. Dust and plaster rained down from the ceiling, and Meri curled around the tablet and display screen they'd taken from the Klenna home. Her armor could take a hit from a few pebbles, but she wasn't sure whether the same could be said of Klenna electronics.

The blast passed quickly, and the building settled--smoke in the air, but no falling roof to worry about--and Lance hauled Meri to her feet.

"What was that?" Pidge demanded, their voice muffled by the ringing in Meri’s ears. "Was that an explosion?"

"Building tried to seal us in," Lance said, tearing out into the hall once more, where the entryway had been blasted wide open, twisted metal poking up through the smoke and weak sunlight filtering down to illuminate it. "Had to blast our way through."

“The _fuck,_ Lance?” Pidge breathed. “There’s _methane_ in this air.”

“Ah,” Lance said. “That explains a few things.”

Pidge went on swearing, but Meri tuned them out, hugged the electronics to her chest as she ran, vaulting over a ceiling beam that had fallen in the middle of the hallway. The ground lurched as she came down, and she went tumbling, twisting so she hit shoulder-first and rolled. She slammed against a sudden split in the ground, where one section of the floor had jutted up a full six inches above the tile next to it. Grunting, she struggled to haul herself upright. Lance and Nyma appeared on either side of her, each of them grabbing her by one arm.

As they pulled her upright, however, her head spun, and another lurch underfoot sent her staggering into Nyma, who dropped to her knees in the act of steadying Meri. The very air seemed to shiver, something cold and hungry creeping up on her. She froze, something primal in her taking over as the contents of her stomach fought to escape her.

"Meri? Meri!" Lance's voice came to her from far away, his panic too muffled to make a dent in her cold horror. "Shit. Nyma!"

Someone else was talking, then, and it seemed to Meri that someone had crept up behind her. She could almost feel their breath stirring the hair on the back of her neck. She should have been frightened, but something about the presence was as familiar as the cold hunger--but in exactly the opposite way. Meri leaned into the presence, breathing out a sigh. The world seemed to shift underneath her, and she realized she'd closed her eyes at some point. She should open them again. She should...

* * *

Lance cursed as Meri collapsed beside Nyma, both of them out cold, Nyma already looking pale. Lance's own body felt a little sluggish, his head foggy and his thoughts hitting him too fast to make sense of it all. Something was wrong. What was wrong? What had happened--the countdown. It must have reached zero, and then...

Then, what?

Didn't matter.

"Guys, we need help," he said. Only after he spoke was he aware of Shiro's presence already at his shoulder. He must have seen what happened. Might even have a better handle on the situation than Lance. "Meri and Nyma are down, and I... there's no way I'm going to be able to carry them out of here." He paused, thoughts suddenly flying to Blue, who stomped impatiently in the corner of his mind.

"No," Allura said, before he'd had a chance to voice the thought. "The weapon is draining the Quintessence from the area. If Blue lands inside that radius, she may not have enough power to lift off again."

That didn't make sense. "Weapon?" he asked, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. "What... I don't remember a weapon?"

"The thing the timer was counting down to," Pidge said.

"Lance," Allura said, her stern voice accompanying a sharp prod directly into his mind. He sat up straighter, trying to make his eyes focus on Meri and Nyma on the floor beside him. He'd dropped to his knees between them--he didn't remember doing that--and he reached out now for Meri, dragging her a few inches closer so he could lay comfortably between them, shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip-to-hip. Someone's approval flooded through him.

He didn't think it was his own.

"We're on our way," Allura said. "Stay where you are, and... hold on."

Lance nodded. "'m not going anywhere," he said. He didn't bother saying that he was too tired to move. He wouldn't have left Meri and Nyma behind even if he'd had the energy to run a marathon. "You should hurry. I don't think they're doing too good."

The voices in his ear drifted in and out of focus, soft around the edges, like a lullaby. Someone was calling his name, over and over, higher and sharper and louder with each repetition. Then, another voice: " _Keith! Look out!_ "

The roar that followed was decidedly not human--or Galra, for that matter. Lance's brows furrowed, but it was getting harder and harder to think. It was probably nothing, anyway. Klenahn was practically a dead planet by now. They hadn't run into a single creature bigger than a pit bull since arriving, just some weird rock-trees and some scaly giant rats.

The roaring came back, different this time.

Inside him.

It was a pleasant sensation. Lulling. It hit him again how tired he was. He seemed to be floating on waves of sleep, and the conversation drifted around him, only occasionally bumping into him and jolting him into a momentary awareness.

He let it slip away. He was so tired, and Klenahn was so quiet.

No one would mind if he took a nap, right?

 _Hold on,_ Allura whispered in his ear. Her arms went around his shoulders, jolting him again to the brink of consciousness, but then the world tilted again, tilted almost upside down, and he followed it down, down into darkness and the raging inferno lurking somewhere deep beneath the planet's crust.


	23. Vkullor's Bane (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins set out for the planet Klenahn, which local legend claims has divine protection against Vkullor. The Klenna people were wiped out 500 years ago after resisting Imperial occupation, but their planet remains. Hunk and Shay went to investigate a massive cavern deep in the mountains north of a major city, Pidge and Val took readings of strange bursts of radio waves, Keith and Matt went to a strange stone forest, Shiro and Allura to the abandoned mines on the planet's moons, and Lance, Nyma, and Meri to the city. In the Imperial HQ in the heart of the city, the Blues found an old defense system that triggered when they entered. It caught them before they were able to escape, leaving all three incapacitated with Shiro and Allura rushing to help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Major character injury.

"Guys?"

Hunk's voice felt impossibly small in the silence that had overtaken the cave. He turned, light sweeping the wall until it found a corner and plunged off into the cavernous depths of this darkness. Shay had stopped beside him, one hand pressed to the side of her helmet as though to block out background noise and better focus on the voices on the comms.

Except there _was_ no background noise to distract.

Just like there were no voices on the comms.

There had been, just a few minutes ago--Meri calling to say they'd run into a problem at Imperial HQ, the rest of the team escalating from attentive to nervous to frantic. The others' voices had grown more and more distorted, fading to a distant whisper as though they were speaking from the far end of a tunnel, and they'd shown no signs of having heard anything Hunk or Shay said. Now...nothing.

"Guys!" Hunk said. "Lance? Shiro? Anyone?" Glancing once at Shay, he turned and retraced their steps back toward the tunnel that led to the elevator, calling out every few steps. "Hello? Can anyone hear me? Guys?"

Sudden static burst in his ear, making him jump, his hand twitching toward the catch for his helmet with an instinctive urge to pull it off and spare his hearing. He caught himself in time, and turned down the volume as much as he dared. He didn't want to go deaf if the static returned, but he didn't want to miss an actual transmission, either.

But no matter how far he retreated toward the entrance, nothing changed. The comms were silent except for the static that returned again and again--never as loud as that first burst, but thick and pervasive.

Shay's hand closed around his arm and spun him around, and his voice deserted him when he saw her face--wide-eyed and pale. "I could not hear you," she said, and the static chased her words. Hunk could hear an echo of them through their armor, muffled, like she was speaking underwater, but it was louder than her voice on the comms. "We must stay close. I do not want to lose contact with you."

"Yeah." Hunk nodded, his heart in his throat. "Yeah, no, that would be bad." He glanced once more around the cavern, then took Shay's hand and turned back toward the elevator. "I don't like it down here. Let's get back to the surface so we can check in with the others."

They hardly made it ten steps before the static in their ears crested again, loud enough to make Hunk cringe and Shay grab for her helmet. Their steps faltered, and Hunk nearly face-planted as the ground beneath him lurched, bucking like an angry horse. He staggered into Shay, who clutched at his arm.

It was only a moment after the fact that Hunk realized she was calling his name.

The comms had gone entirely dead, only a low, constant hum filling Hunk's ears, a ringing he couldn't shake. He thought, for a horrifying moment, that he'd gone deaf.

The crack of breaking rock, far overhead, disabused him of that notion, and he scrambled back, dragging Shay with him as a massive slab of stone came crashing down in front of them. It hit the cavern floor with a tremendous crash, kicking up a cloud of dust that caught the light of Hunk's headlamp, scattering the beam until all Hunk could see was a whitish-pink haze all around, so thick it even partially obscured Shay.

Hunk ducked his head, shielding his face with his arm. After the thunder of the falling stone, absolute silence returned for three short seconds. Then, another ripple shook the ground underfoot, and more cracks split the air like gunshots.

Hunk's heart plummeted. "Shay," he whispered. Then, remembering the interference on the comms, he tried again. "SHAY!" He squeezed her wrist and pulled, glancing back just long enough to see his own fear reflected on her face.

They said nothing more as they ran for the elevator. The fallen stone lay in a broken heap between them and the tunnel, crumbling stone and jagged edges promising a difficult climb. With the dust in the air, Hunk couldn't see how far the collapse extended, or whether it had blocked the tunnel.

He hoped it hadn't. If it had, they were trapped in here.

If they were trapped, with the cavern collapsing, static on the comms, and miles of stone between them and escape, then they were already dead.

The loudest crack yet split the air, making Hunk jump. That had been close--directly overhead. He ran harder, blood pumping, and didn't slow--until Shay's hand was ripped out of his.

He turned to see her on the ground, clutching her shoulder as she writhed in pain. A chunk of rock the size of a microwave lay on the ground beside her, cracked in two.

Hunk's stomach heaved, but he raced back to Shay. "It's okay," he said, though he knew she couldn't hear him. "You're okay. Come on. We need to get out of here."

The cracking, groaning sounds were a constant now, a hum in the air like the static on the comms. A chunk of rock shattered not ten feet away, little chips of stone plinking against Hunk's helmet. He pulled Shay's uninjured arm over his shoulders, and they ran, a roar of thunder following on their heels. Dust billowed on all sides, and their headlamp beams jumped and bounced, catching the mouth of the tunnel back to the elevator.

A hundred feet away, something slammed into Hunk's back. He went sprawling, losing track of Shay, losing sight of the tunnel, and all there was was the thunder, and pain.

* * *

Keith leaped backward as the beast's claw came down on the hard-packed ground where he'd been standing. He cursed, feet skidding on gravel. One of Klenahn's tough, almost rocky vines appeared under his heel and he tripped, going down hard. The dense, yellowish fog that coated the ground here swirled around him.

"Keith!" Matt cried, charging in. The weak sunlight caught the edge of Matt's sword as he raised it, slashing at the creature.

The squat, six-legged creature was as tough as everything else on this planet, its carapace thick enough to turn aside Keith's sword. Even the bayard barely scratched the surface. Each leg, sharp and armored, ended in a single massive claw that could have punctured steel. It gave the overall impression of a massive, thick-skinned insect, except for the head, which had entirely too many teeth, along with four small eyes, almost entirely pupil, and pits in the carapace just above the snout--a nasal passage, or maybe a heat- or Quintessence-sensing organ.

It was a hunter, but it hadn't come here looking for food.

Matt's sword caught the softer skin at the beast's throat, where the carapace gave way to allow for range of motion, and the creature roared in pain and fear. It reared up on its hind two sets of legs, tossing its head and knocking Matt aside with a glancing blow from its front leg.

Keith was up again in an instant, circling the creature in search of an opening. It seemed frenzied-- _scared_. Meri had barely had time to warn the rest of them about whatever weapon they'd triggered at the base in the city before the creature came charging out of the trees--running _away_  from the city.

"Whatever you guys did, I think this thing can feel it," Keith said, breathing hard. He paused, and when no one answered, he turned his head, searching for a sound on the comms. "Guys? Lance?"

"Something happened, Keith," Shiro said. "Allura and I are already on our way."

Keith frowned. "What do you mean something happened? Are they okay? Are they--?"

The beast wheeled toward him--drawn to his voice, maybe, or just remembering that there was a second threat here. Whatever the case, its head caught Keith in the gut. He flew backward, slamming against a tree. The breath rushed out of him as he dropped to the ground. His head spun, and he struggled to remember what he'd been thinking about.

"Are you okay?" Shiro asked. "Pidge, Val, wrap it up. Head for Keith and Matt--"

"It's okay," Matt said. He caught the beast's claw on his sword, the impact reflected in his voice. "Just some wild animal. Scared. Seems to have decided we're a threat, but if we can scare it off, we should be fine."

Keith coughed, hauling himself up on a low-hanging tree branch. "You have a _plan_? Cause as far as I can tell, we're just making this thing more angry."

Matt stopped, his sword wavering. After a moment, he opened his hand, letting the bayard drop and dissipate. "You're right," he said. "Let's see how he likes fire."

" _Fire_?" Pidge asked. "Weren't you listening, Matt? Don't--"

Matt raised his hand, palm out, and a column of fire erupted from the ground directly in front of the beast.

At least... it began as a column. A pillar of light that burned itself into Keith's vision in the instant before it exploded.

A white flash consumed the forest, and Keith didn't even have the time to shield his eyes. The explosion hit him faster than thought, an inferno of heat and light and a shockwave that sent Keith tumbling backwards, skidding across the ground as a roaring filled his ears.

It was over in an instant, but Keith remained where he had fallen, stunned. His heart hammered in his chest, racing at such a pace Keith was certain it would fail at any moment. His vision was a wash of sparks and shadows, the trees all around him shifting in and out of focus as he struggled to breathe. He felt like he'd been impaled, skewered straight through the lung by a branch or a metal pipe or his own sword. Gasping for air, he craned his head, patting his chest in search of a wound.

He found none, but he still couldn't breathe. Maybe he'd broken a rib. Punctured a lung.

People were shouting in his ear, loud and frantic and making his breath come faster and shallower. The first thing he heard was Matt's name, repeated over and over.

Matt.

Where was he?

He'd been closer to the heart of the explosion.

If Keith was in this bad a shape, what had happened to Matt?

"Will one of you fucking answer?"

Pidge.

Were they crying?

Keith rolled onto his side, grunting as the last of his breath rushed out of him. He had to stop, one hand braced on the ground, his head spinning. It was quiet all around, unnervingly so, and Keith's next breath rasped loud in the confines of his helmet.

"Keith?" Pidge asked. "Say something!"

"Here," he said, ignoring the spinning in his head and forcing himself to look around. He saw Matt at once, lying limp on the ground not far away. Somewhere beyond, almost too far for Keith to see, between the yellow haze and his own darkened vision, the beast lumbered to its feet. It let out a short, huffing cry and limped away.

Keith hardly spared it a glance. He stared at Matt, willing him to get up, to say something. Keith himself didn't feel steady enough to stand, but he tried to anyway, wheezing and falling against trees and tripping over irregularities in the ground as he stumbled toward Matt.

"Keith?" Pidge called. "Are you okay? Where's Matt?"

Keith didn't have the breath to answer.

"Just... hold on," they said after a brief pause. "We're almost there. Okay?"

Keith hummed, dropping to his knees beside Matt. His armor was scorched, the fabric singed, but that wasn't what had Keith worried.

Matt had landed hard, his head slamming against a stone. The faceplate had cracked--a deep crack that ran almost halfway across it, and several other spiderwebbing fissures besides. Keith stared at it for a long moment, his mind quiet, his chest aching as he wheezed through his next few breaths.

"Pidge?" he finally said, sinking to the ground beside Matt.

"Yeah?"

"Hurry."

* * *

"Pidge, Val," Shiro barked. "Change of plans."

Pidge sent a sharp look toward the comms, shifting their grip on the controls as the mountains fell away beneath them and the city loomed large ahead. "What do you mean, change of plans?"

"I need you two to get Lance, Meri, and Nyma."

Pidge sucked in a deep breath. "Keith needs me. I told him I was coming, Shiro, I promised him--"

"Matt's hurt." Shiro's voice was low, calm, and he leaned on the bond, urging Pidge toward the city, forcing their eyes away from the forest beyond. "I'm not sure how bad yet, but he's unresponsive and his helmet's seal is broken. He needs a cryopod, and he may need Allura to stabilize him until we can make it back to the castle."

Pidge felt like they'd just been sucker-punched. "What?"

"Toxic atmosphere, likely head wound, who knows what that explosion did to him..." Shiro trailed off. "We'll get him. We're almost there. But I need to know that someone's got the others."

"But..." Pidge faltered as Val caught their attention with a tug on the bond. Pidge's eyes went unfocused as they looked through Val's. She'd pulled up the BLIP-tech scans, highlighting Quintessence.

The city was almost entirely devoid of it--one massive pocket of it deep underground, and three faint pinpricks on the surface where Lance and the others had been, and that was it. It was like Haggar's superweapon, the one the paladins had destroyed more than a year ago on Berlou. Smaller in scale; this Quintessence leech hardly reached beyond the city limits, nowhere near the planet-killing potential of the newer version.

But it was just as deadly for anyone trapped in its range.

Right now, that meant Lance, Meri, and Nyma. They weren't dead yet; Lance seemed to be producing Quintessence a little faster than the weapon was draining it, but most of that was going to Meri and Nyma.

"All right," Pidge said, yanking back on the controls as they shot over the city. They cut a tight arc over a sea of squat, irregular buildings, and sped back toward the Imperial base. It would be too dangerous to land; Pidge and Val both saw that at once. The weapon, whatever it was, was still running, and it could easily drain Green to the point that she could no longer fly.

"Think you can turn it off?" Val asked, releasing the catch on her harness as they approached the base.

Pidge pressed a hand to the control panel, willing Green to stay clear until Pidge called, then stood and shot a crooked smile at Val. "Guess I'm gonna have to figure it out, huh? You gonna be okay alone?"

"All I have to do is sit there," she said. "Lance is holding out so far, so with both of us there, it should be fine."

_Should be._

Pidge didn't need the bond to feel Val's uncertainty, but there was no time for doubts. Green lowered her ramp as they approached, and Pidge and Val headed down, a display on Pidge's helmet tracking the others' positions. They jumped together, the wind catching them at once and dragging them back. Pidge had never been sky-diving before, though they'd seen plenty of movies. Spread your arms and legs and tilt your body to control your fall.

Turned out it was harder than it looked, but you couldn't drift too far off-target in a hundred feet. They fired their jets to slow their fall, landing lightly at the end of the street, the black angles of the Imperial base visible just ahead.

Almost at once, Pidge felt the weapon's effect. Their body was heavier than it should have, every step dragging as they started to run for the building. Val had landed a short distance from Pidge, and she seemed to be feeling it too. Both were breathing hard by the time they reached the building.

A hole had been blown in the side of it, wreckage littering the street outside and clogging the hallway within. Val charged straight in, scrambling over the rubble and dropping to her knees beside three figures before Pidge had even noticed they were there.

"Still alive," Val said, glancing over her shoulder. "We need to get that thing shut down."

"On it." Pidge charged past Val as she got herself settled beside Meri and pulled Nyma's head into her lap. Pidge didn't stay long enough to see more than that. All they could do was hope that Val's Quintessence was enough to keep them all alive long enough for Pidge to find the control room and shut this place down. 

The open door at the end of the hall showed a full wall of instrument panels, four stations scattered around the small space. "Perfect," Pidge said, charging in and dropping into the nearest chair. "Now let's see what makes you tick..."

* * *

Shiro was already out of his seat by the time he spotted Keith and Matt on the forest floor. Black could handle the landing--it might be a little more abrupt than if Shiro were behind the controls, but she was hardly an incompetent pilot, and if it meant he could be ready to sprint out the second they were grounded, he could deal with a little bit of jarring.

Allura hovered at his shoulder all the way down the ramp, her mind buzzing with concern and unanswered questions as they waited to touch down. The bond crackled even deeper than Allura's thoughts, flickers of darkness, of pain; of Keith sitting, dazed, beside Matt; of Lance stirring, watching Val with half-lidded eyes as she managed a feeble smile. _Hey, baby cousin._  Of Hunk and Shay...

Where _were_ Hunk and Shay? With all the chaos happening on the surface, Shiro's attention had been somewhat laser-focused, but he realized, with an icy feeling in the pit of his stomach, that he hadn't heard from either of them for several minutes now.

He closed his eyes, trying to search them out, but the Black Lion suddenly lurched, a _bang_  and a horrible metallic shriek peeling back layers of Shiro's concentration. Allura fell against the wall, her helmet clanging on the metal, and Shiro narrowly saved himself the same fate. He steadied Allura with one hand as he plunged into the bond to peer out through Black's eyes.

The Red Lion had arrived, slamming into Black before crash-landing and skidding several hundred feet, taking out a wide swath of forest in the process.

Shiro glanced at Allura, whose frown said she'd seen it too. "Get us down there," he called to Black. "We need to know how bad it is."

They landed, hard, a second later, and Shiro's knees nearly buckled from the impact. He straightened in time to charge out before the ramp was fully extended, leaping from Black's mouth to the cracked and broken ground. Black had left a small crater with her landing--nowhere near the trail of destruction Red had blazed, but enough to trip Shiro up as he scrambled up and over the lip.

Akira--no, _Red_  had already reached Keith and Matt and was crouched beside them, gently scooping Matt up with an arm beneath his knees and another around his shoulders. They turned, apparently headed for the Red Lion, and Keith stared after them, brow furrowed and mouth open as though ready to protest but uncertain what to say.

"Red!" Shiro bellowed, giving chase. "Red, slow down. Would you _stop_?"

He reached out to grab Red by the shoulder, but his fingers had hardly brushed their armor before they rounded on him, the magenta spark deep in their pupils blazing brighter than ever. The markings on their skin burned like embers, bright enough to cast nebulous shadows inside their helmet. Their lip pulled back in a snarl, and they _growled_. There was no other word for it--pure animal fury, a clear warning to back off.

Allura seemed not to care. She brushed past Shiro and stormed up to Red, not even flinching as they leaped back, out of her reach, growl growing louder.

Allura shifted subtly, growing a few inches to loom over Red. "I'm trying to _help_ ," she said. "It's going to take too long to get him back to the castle. Let me heal him. At _least_ let me go with you."

For a moment, Shiro was sure it was going to turn into a fight. Red hardly seemed to recognize Allura, and he was certain the only thing holding them back from attacking her was the fact that they were holding Matt. To attack would mean to drop him.

After a moment, though, the growl faded, and Red turned without a word. Allura followed close behind, her hands coming up to frame Matt's head. She matched Red's pace, adjusting admirably for their gait, and didn't so much as turn her head as she spoke, trusting the comms to carry her voice.

"Take care of Keith. I'll go with Red and make sure Matt makes it to a pod."

Everything in Shiro wanted to argue, to demand to go with Matt, but he bit his tongue and nodded, though Allura couldn't see him. "Keep me updated."

"I swear it," Allura said.

Then she was gone, disappearing with Red and Matt into the Red Lion. Shiro turned away, forcing himself not to stare as the lion took off for the sky. He focused instead on Keith, who was still dazed. His armor was scorched and scored, but it was still intact. There was no blood or other obvious signs of a wound, but he was slow to react when Shiro called his name.

"Keith," he said again, dropping to one knee to catch Keith's eye. He turned slowly, but his eyes stuck on Shiro's shoulder. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

Keith shook his head.

Shiro frowned. "No, you're not hurt?"

Keith nodded.

"Can you stand?"

For a moment, Keith gave no indication that he had heard. Then, without a word, he uncurled, staggering to his feet. He accepted Shiro's offer of help without thinking. If he'd been more aware, he might have pushed Shiro away to hide how badly his hands were shaking.

A panic attack? Keith wasn't particularly prone to those, but almost everyone on the team had had one at some point over the last year. War was brutal, and watching a brother fall and not get up could rattle even the most sturdy of them. It could still be a head injury, but Keith didn't seem confused or disoriented, more shaken and withdrawn. With careful, focused questions, he managed to get a few details from Keith, shared mostly in nods and shakes of the head. Keith didn't remember hitting his head. His head didn't hurt. The only thing that hurt was his chest.

Shiro couldn't elicit a description of that pain, but it wasn't stopping Keith from walking. Nor did he seem bothered by Shiro's arm around him, holding him up. It did seem to be taking a lot of Keith's focus to breathe, though. Shiro wasn't sure if that was an injury, or another symptom of a panic attack.

"Let's get you into the lion," Shiro said. "Okay? I need to check on the others, but if you feel worse, you need to tell me. Okay?"

Keith nodded.

"Can you speak? I won't be able to see a nod once I'm flying."

"Okay," Keith said. It was soft, thin, and breathless--but it was speaking, and Shiro didn't want to push Keith too far.

"Okay," he said. "I'll check in on you every so often. If you're doing okay, just say so. You don't need to give me details, just say something so I know you're still hanging in there."

"Yeah." Keith sagged against the wall, pulling out of Shiro's grasp as he headed for the bench seat at the back of the cockpit, where he laid himself down, one arm still curled around his ribs.

Shiro frowned, but he couldn't afford to linger any longer than he already had. He needed to check in with Pidge and Val, see if they'd reached the others. He dropped into his seat, cranking up the stabilizers in the cockpit as high as they would go to try to give Keith a smooth ride.

"Pidge," he said, lifting off and turning toward the city. "How's it going?"

"Finally figured out how to turn the damn weapon off." Pidge's words dripped with exhaustion, and they paused to breathe before going on. "Val and I are with the others. Lance is awake, but he's got zero energy. The other two are still out. Still breathing. Dunno if we can move them."

"I'm on my way," he said. "I'll help you load them into Green, and you can take them back to the castle. I'll make sure Allura and Coran are ready for you." The city streets flashed past below him, but his target was easy to see; smoke rose from a building that didn't match the surrounding architecture, and both the Blue and Green Lions had landed outside, crouched down to peer in.

Black roared, and the other two lions grudgingly shifted to make room for Black on the street.

Keith groaned before Shiro could check on him, and when Shiro turned, he found Keith sitting up, his head in his hands, like he meant to come with Shiro. Shiro paused beside him, planting a hand on either shoulder and pressing him back down onto the bench. "Stay here," he said. "I won't be long."

He found them just inside the twisted remains of the front door, five paladins huddled in a pile amidst the rubble--Val curled around Nyma, with Lance leaning on her shoulder; Pidge wedged into the narrow space between Lance and Meri. Pidge and Val were both pale and drawn, but they were awake, and upright, and both turned toward Shiro as soon as he stepped up into the doorway. Lance cracked his eyes a moment later, one corner of his mouth tugging toward a smile.

"Hey, boss-man," he said. "Sorry for all the trouble."

"You don't need to apologize, Lance," Shiro said. "Come on. Let's get you up."

Lance's brow furrowed, but he clearly didn't have the energy to resist as Shiro picked him up. "But... Nyma 'nd Meri..."

"They're better off staying with Pidge and Val for now." Shiro didn't want to say that leaving Lance with them, letting them siphon off more of his Quintessence, was too dangerous, but it was clear that they'd bled him almost dry. Shiro barely had to strain to pick him up--but he didn't turn toward Green, or toward Blue. He didn't want Meri and Nyma too close to Lance for now, but he also didn't trust Lance not to stick around in case there was danger, never mind he was in no shape to fly.

He deposited him, instead, inside Black, on the bench next to Keith, who was sitting up once more, just as dizzy as the last time he'd tried it.

Lance frowned. "What happened?"

"Explosion," Shiro said. "He's not hurt, just in shock." He hoped.

But Lance had stiffened, reaching out for Keith at once. Shiro left them to it. They'd probably keep each other from overdoing it better than Shiro could hope to, anyway. He hurried back to the base and took Meri next, directing Pidge to follow him so he could get them situated together inside Green. The lion would have to pilot herself back to the castle, as would Blue, but they'd done it before. They'd done much _more_ , in the name of their paladins' safety.

Shiro returned quickly with Nyma and Val and got them situated opposite Pidge and Meri. He hesitated before leaving, glancing between the two green paladins. "Have either of you heard from Hunk or Shay?"

Pidge frowned, and Val shook her head. "Not since things started going bad, I think," Val said.

Pidge struggled upright. "You don't think something happened to them, do you?"

"I think you all need to get back to the castle. Green?" A purr answered him at once, and Shiro nodded. "I'll find Hunk and Shay, and we'll all regroup once everyone's had a turn in the cryopods."

Pidge looked like they wanted to argue, but Shiro didn't stay to hear it. He dashed out of Green, who took off almost at once, Blue following close behind. Shiro switched his comms to Hunk and Shay's frequency while he hurried back to Black. "Hunk, Shay, status report." Silence. "Hunk, Shay, do you copy?"

The silence stretched, and Shiro cursed as he hurried into Black's cockpit and switched to the castle's line. "Coran, I've got a few more headed your way. Quintessence drain. Pidge and Val are conscious, but they're going to need some rest. Nyma and Meri might need some time in the pods." He paused as Coran muttered an acknowledgement, seemingly distracted. He must still be working on Matt. A rumbling growl suggested Red was still being difficult.

Shiro ignored that and pulled up the BLIP-tech scan, zooming out until he could see the place where Hunk and Shay had gone to explore. "I can't get a hold of Hunk or Shay, but I've got them on the scanners. I'm going to go see what's happening. Keith and Lance are with me... How's Matt?"

"Inhaled more of those gasses than I'd like," Coran said brusquely, "but we've nearly got him settled. Should be done in time for the new arrivals. I'll need to send someone down to help with transport, though--"

"Then I won't keep you. Good luck." Shiro cut the call and lifted off, his eyes on the mountains in the distance.

"Everything okay?" Lance asked.

Shiro pursed his lips, glad neither of them could see his face. "That's what we're about to find out. Hold on."

* * *

Lana pressed a hand to her chest, her breath coming short as the room around her spun.

"Lana? Lana, something's wrong."

Lana looked up to find Akani swaying on her feet in the middle of the kitchen with one hand tangled in her hair. She was pale and sweating, but her hand was cold to the touch when Lana reached out to take it. Her own head was pounding, a vice clamped around her chest, and as she tried to help Akani sit, before she passed out and hit her head, something in Lana's back spasmed, a white-hot bolt of pain bursting out in every direction and blotting all other thoughts from her head.

She froze, and Akani cried out as she dropped to the floor.

When the pain passed, Lana sat beside her, hands shaking and every inch of her throbbing like she'd just taken a beating. "Are you okay?"

Akani shook her head. "I don't know. I can't... Can't breathe. Hurts."

Lana's back twinged again, and the breath rushed out of her at the same moment as Akani gasped again, her hand fumbling across the floor until it found Lana's and squeezed. She still held a wooden spoon, dripping sauce all over the floor. The pots remained on the stove; dinner were going to burn at this rate.

Lana found it hard to care. Everything hurt, and breathing was hard. _Thinking_ was hard with this headache drilling into her skull. She barely had the energy to lift Akani's hand high enough to kiss it. "It's okay. It's going to be okay."

"It's Hunk," Akani whispered. She lifted her head, eyes wide and frightened. "You can feel it, right? It's the bond. Hunk and Shay... They're hurt."

Lana's heart faltered. "Shit. _Shit._ " She pulled away from Akani, dragging herself up on the edge of the counter. Her head spun, her legs felt like they'd turned to mush, but she dragged herself to the comms panel on the wall and braced herself with one arm as she slapped the screen until she managed to open a call to the bridge.

One of Coran's officers answered; Lana didn't recognize him, but she knew the uniform. "Where's Coran?"

"Infirmary," the man said.

Lana couldn't breathe. "The paladins?"

"I'm not sure, ma'am. Would you like me to transfer you?"

Lana nodded, pressing her forehead to the wall as she waited. The wall was pleasantly cool, and the pressure momentarily distracted her from the pain. After just a moment, the silence broke, voices and the background hum of medical equipment alerting her to the call before she pulled back and saw Allura's face.

Allura's distraction and impatience fell away in an instant, before Lana could even speak, and Lana knew right then.

It wasn't Hunk or Shay who was in the infirmary.

They were still out there.

And they were hurt.

* * *

A dog was whining.

It was an odd thought to have, maybe, but it was the first thing that occurred to Hunk when he woke up.

Woke up... He'd been sleeping?

No.

He'd been unconscious. There was a difference, and that difference was the massive headache pounding at the base of his skull.

_What happened? Where am I?_

Groaning, he pushed himself up.

He tried to.

He met resistance at once, and a sharp pain in his hand snapped him fully awake.

He opened his eyes to darkness, and an explosion of lights at the very fringes of his vision.

He couldn't move.

Couldn't breathe.

There was something on top of him, pinning him to the ground.

In another moment, it all came rushing back to him. The cracking. The falling stone. Shay going down--

"Shay."

Her name escaped him on a wheeze, and he realized with a spike of panic that he couldn't breathe. He couldn't--

He was dying. Crushed beneath a massive slab of stone, suffocated, if he was lucky. Otherwise he was facing a slow death of dehydration. The comms weren't working. The others didn't know what had happened. Would they be able to get here, even if they knew? Without causing an even bigger collapse?

" _Shay_."

He called her name again, but hardly managed to put any more punch into it. He didn't know why he was trying, anyway. With the comms down, she never would have heard him.

He just wanted to know if she was okay. What if she'd been hit, too? What if she was already dead?

"Shay!"

A skitter of rocks, close enough to stop Hunk's heart. He waited for another collapse, for something else to fall on top of him, to finish the job and crush him completely. (It occurred to him that it ought to hurt more, being crushed to death. He was probably in shock or something.)

The skittering paused, then went on again, and he realized it wasn't the ceiling collapsing. It was too quiet for that, and lower to the ground.

Shay groaned, and Hunk sagged with relief. He couldn't breathe a full sigh, though he wanted to. "Shay," he called, pausing to breathe before he called again. "You okay?"

"Hunk...?"

"I'm here. I'm--" He ran out of breath again, and coughed, and there, finally, was the pain. Dull but focused, like someone digging a finger into his ribs. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't exactly agony, either. More distressing was the coughing; once he started, it was hard to stop. He tasted dust on his tongue, and something sharp and bitter and--

His eyes snapped open, his coughing fit petering out as he gasped and wheezed.

His helmet's faceplate was shattered.

That was...

That was bad. Klenahn's atmosphere was toxic, and the dust in the air here definitely wasn't helping. At least with the helmet sealed, he could have cranked up the oxygen output from his armor's cycler, helped himself breathe a little more efficiently.

That was assuming his armor wasn't too badly damaged. Half-crushed as he was, who was to say any of it was working at all? Maybe he was _lucky_  his helmet was busted. Maybe otherwise, he'd have suffocated faster.

He was going to die either way. What had Pidge said was in the air here? They'd listed a whole bunch of stuff, but it was the chlorine that stuck in Hunk's head. Chlorine was bad news. _Real_  bad news. Maybe that was why he was having trouble breathing, even though he wasn't in pain. He wasn't being crushed; he was choking on chlorine gas and whatever else was in the air here.

As panic closed in, he started wheezing again, and wheezing turned to coughing, to tunneled vision, to tightness in his chest as he tried and failed to get enough air.

"Hunk. Hunk!"

Shay was calling him, but he couldn't say anything. Couldn't make the coughing stop. All he could do was wait it out, sucking in air whenever he could and praying this wasn't the end.

When the coughing fit finally subsided, he felt moisture on his cheeks, a dull ache in his chest, a throbbing in his head. His throat was raw, but Shay was still calling his name, sobbing it. There was light somewhere beyond the dark, cramped space around him--real light, not just phantom glows dancing on his eyelids. It filtered down through the rocks and the rubble, painting a faint impression of the space around him. He seemed to have wound up on the edge of a small chamber in the rubble--low ceiling, deep shadows. A larger slab must have landed balanced on some other bit of stone. It had probably saved his life.

"I'm still here," he whispered. He licked his lips and tried again. "I'm here, Shay."

"Thank the stars," Shay murmured. "Are you well?"

He laughed, but stopped himself quickly. Laughing was too much like coughing. It ached, and it left him feeling like he might devolve into another coughing fit at any moment. "I'm pinned beneath a gigantic slab of stone, I'm breathing poison, and neither of us can call for help. I wouldn't say I'm _well_ , but I'm alive. For now."

Shay was silent for a long while, and Hunk cursed himself for saying that. He wasn't the only one trapped here. He wasn't the only one who didn't want to die.

"I'm scared," he said.

"I am, too." Shay breathed for a moment, rasping loud enough for Hunk to hear, and then she began to hum.

The sound hit him like a punch to the gut, choking him up for a long moment. That was the Balmera song--no, it was _Yellow's_  song, comfort and peace and strength all at once, intimately familiar and resonating inside him in a way nothing but the song and the bond ever could.

He shouldn't have been able feel it like this, not when the sound was in the air instead of in his mind--but in some ways, if felt like it _was_  coming from within, never mind he could hear Shay's voice, never mind they weren't in Yellow or on a Balmera to facilitate their bond. He closed his eyes, and Shay's comfort washed over him.

The humming faltered, and Shay whimpered. She was scared, too, and hurt, and yet she'd tried her hardest to comfort him. He owed her the same.

So he hummed--faltering, his voice failing him and his confidence thinner than rice paper. But he hummed, and he swore his awareness reached out along with his voice, brushing up against Shay's mind and reinforcing their connection. Her voice rejoined his, and they hummed together, sharing their fears and setting them aside.

Panic wasn't going to get them out of here.

"Okay," Hunk said, once he was sure he wouldn't break down again. "Okay. First things first. Can you feel your hands? Feet?"

There was a pause as Shay, presumably, checked, as Hunk himself did. "Yes," she said at length. "I can."

"Good," Hunk said. "That's good..."

"Hunk?"

"I can't feel my legs." He breathed in, wincing as his ribs twinged. "It's okay. It's... Maybe it's just shock. I'm sure the cryopod can fix it."

Shay's silence spoke volumes--but that was okay. Hunk just had to... not think about it. If he got out of here... If _Shay_  got out of here, at least... That was enough. And maybe she'd be able to lead the others back. Before Hunk suffocated.

He hummed again, just a few notes, just enough to remind himself of the steadiness the song brought.

"Next step: how much can you move? My arms are free, but I've got something on my... on my legs, I think? Comes up to the middle of my back, maybe my shoulders. I can't lift it."

"My..." Shay swallowed. "My arm is pinned. A large piece of stone. If I move it, even a little, it hurts."

"You think it's broken?"

"I don't know."

"That's okay," Hunk said. "You can still feel it, so... that's good. What else? Sounds like your helmet's as busted as mine. I landed face-first; probably smashed it then."

"I am on my back. One of the stones was lying against my head. It broke the visor, but the helmet itself is mostly intact."

"What about the rest of you? Can you move your other arm? Your legs?"

Shay hesitated, and rubble shifted. Hunk's heart pounded as Shay grunted, but it didn't sound like a pained noise. "Smaller pieces, I think," she said. "My legs won't move much, but if I had my arm free, I might be able to dig myself out."

"Sounds like you're in a better position than me, at least," Hunk said with a chuckle. "Can you get any leverage on the rock pinning your arm? Roll toward it, brace your shoulder against it, maybe?"

Shay grunted, and stone shifted. Hunk had to bite his tongue to keep from spewing out a dozen more suggestions all at once. It helped to feel like he was doing something, since all he _could_  do was talk. Think his way out of this. Try to come up with a solution.

More stone skittered away somewhere in the darkness, a few pebbles venturing into the light. It gave Hunk his first concrete impression of where Shay was--somewhere to his right, out of his line of sight but probably not too far away. If she could free her arm, dig herself out a little, she could probably scoot into the open space and have a little room to maneuver. 

A sudden cry of pain, sharp and soft, pierced him. He strained against the stone pinning him, trying to wriggle forward, to catch a glimpse of her. Stone ground on stone, but it didn't move far enough to make a difference. "Shay? Shay!"

Breathing, ragged and pained. Hunk strained against the rock, crying out in pain as something in his back pulled, a spear of lightning shooting down into his leg. It was the first thing he'd felt from his lower body since he'd woken up, and he seized onto it, bracing his hands against the ground beneath him, ignoring the sharp pain in his left hand, and pushing with everything he had. The song slipped out of him in fragments, escaping on every ragged breath.

The stone shifted--first a hair's breadth, then scraping against the stone beneath it. For a fraction of a second, it lifted off the ground, but Hunk's arms wavered and it settled back into place.

Shay's voice answered him, pitched high with pain and breathless as stone shifted again, and more and more pebbles skittered out into the light--more than just pebbles now. Chunks of rock the size of Hunk's fist, slides of dust and dirt and debris. And then, Shay, tumbling out into the open with a cry of pain.

Hunk's heart lurched at the sight of her, armor cracked and dented, her mangled arm tucked against her stomach. The entire visor on her helmet was a mess of spiderwebbing cracks, and she tugged it off, flinging it into the shadows on the far side of the hollow. Aside from the visor and her arm, the armor seemed to have maintained most of its integrity. There were cuts on her face, a crack in her carapace near her jawline, but the arm looked to be the worst of it.

"Thank god," Hunk whispered. "Oh, thank god."

Shay turned at the sound of his voice, her face streaked with grimy tear tracks and coated in reddish dust. Her eyes widened at the sight of him.

He tried for a smile. "That bad, huh?"

Shay scrambled toward him, ducking to keep from hitting her head on the low-hanging roof. She skidded to a stop beside him, crouched to tug off his helmet and take his face between her hands, which began to glow.

Hunk grabbed them at once to stop her. "Save your energy," he said. "I... I think I'm going to need your help to get out from under this thing. I can barely move it."

Shay hesitated, but her hands had stopped glowing. She nodded, bending lower to press her forehead to his, their noses brushing. She hummed, the sound sinking into his skin, slowing his breathing.

" _Pax,_ " she breathed. "It will be okay."

He believed her.

He shouldn't have, not so easily. Not when they were both wounded, and trapped, and had barely any room to move around. Not when the air all around them was poison. (At the thought, his chest grew tight again, and he swallowed a cough. Not now.)

Shay turned, sliding in beside him, crouched with her shoulders braced against the underside of the stone atop Hunk. She pressed one hand to the ground for balance, the other, injured, one cradled in her lap.

"Ready?" she asked.

Hunk breathed deep and closed his eyes. "Ready."

"Now."

Hunk braced his hands on the ground and pushed, and Shay heaved with all her might beside him. The stone inched up, slowly, but the pressure on Hunk's lungs eased, and the pressure on his hips, and his back twinged again, the pain radiating down into his leg once more as the sudden freedom gave him room to arch his back as he pressed against the stone.

"Hunk!" Shay cried, pained and desperate and too absorbed in holding the stone to say more.

Hunk listened anyway. He grabbed onto pits in the ground before him and pulled, trying to push at the same time with legs he couldn't feel. He didn't know if they responded, or if it was only in his head, but suddenly he was sliding free, sliding down into the lowest part of the hollow and curling on his side. The palm of his glove was split, blood seeping out from a deep gash. His head pounded, and when he touched three fingers to his forehead, he found blood there, too.

He didn't dare to look at his legs, but they'd curled up along with the rest of them--seemingly of their own mind, as Hunk still couldn't feel more than the pain radiating down from his spine.

The stone dropped back into place with a crash, stirring up dust and setting Hunk coughing again as Shay collapsed beside him. She hummed, and checked him, and poured her Quintessence into him for long moments before he managed to wave her off.

"We need to get out of here," he said. "Get somewhere we can contact the others."

He scooped up his helmet and checked the transmitter behind the ear. Crushed. With time and tools, Hunk might have been able to salvage it, but seeing as he had neither, he tossed the helmet aside. One less thing to carry.

He grabbed Shay's helmet next, and breathed out in a rush as he saw that her transmitter had escaped the worst of the damage. He summoned the bayard and managed to make it hold the form of a knife after two tries. The blade was sharp enough to cut away the ruined faceplate, leaving Shay with a clear field of vision and no jagged edges to scratch her face.

He handed it back to her. "Put this back on. It's still on the open channel. Hopefully we'll start to pick up a signal once we get closer to the exit."

He glanced up next, and Shay followed his gaze. Most of the gaps in the broken ceiling of this chamber were thin--places near the edges where the broken chunks of stone didn't sit right and light was able to slither in. The biggest of these was near the far side of the space, beyond the massive slab that made up three-quarters of the ceiling. 

Shay saw what he did and crawled over, shoving stones away and pulling them in, flinging them behind her into the corners of the narrow space. There was enough room for the two of them, out here in the open, but not much more than that, and there were only a few places they could get higher than hands-and-knees without hitting stone.

Shay worked tirelessly, though, digging one-handed until the opening was wide enough for her to crawl through. She turned back, the light glinting off the few clean edges of her armor as she reached her hand back in for Hunk. He took it, and did his best to help her pull him free. His body still wasn't cooperating, but Shay would never leave him behind. He knew that without having to ask, so however much he wanted to tell her to leave without him, that he would only slow her down and get them both killed, he didn't waste his breath.

They got out of here together, or not at all.

The cavern had changed.

For a long moment, after getting free, Hunk could only gape at it. Panels of lights lined the distant ceiling of the cavern, dark gouges marking the places where the ceiling--and the lights mounted there--had collapsed. The whine Hunk had been hearing since he woke up, which had faded quickly to background noise, buzzed in the air, an expectation mounting with every passing second.

Hunk stared at it all, trying to memorize the lines, the patterns of the panels and the conduit that connected them.

"What is this place?" Shay breathed.

Hunk shook his head. "A machine..."

A coughing fit overtook Shay at that moment, bending her double and squeezing tears from the corners of her eyes. Hunk rubbed her back, humming to her until the fit passed and she straightened. She took off her helmet to wipe her face, then glanced at Hunk. "Can you stand?"

"Only one way to find out."

Shay helped him up, drawing his arm around her neck and supporting most of his weight. Hunk stared straight ahead, still afraid to look at his legs. Shay had cringed only a little when she looked down, which probably meant they weren't completely mangled. He hoped. They were still oddly numb, but they listened to him, and though he never could have supported his own weight, he managed to sort of hobble along with Shay's help.

Maybe it wasn't a spinal cord injury, then. Maybe it was only numb because of the shock...

He didn't know, but he didn't let himself think about it. He didn't have _time_  to think about it. They'd been close to the mouth of the tunnel, but it seemed to take forever to reach it, crawling over and around rubble one step at a time, every step draining more and more energy.

Every thirty seconds, Shay called out on the comms, waiting for an answer that never came. They stopped, briefly, just inside the tunnel, Shay wracked by another coughing fit, Hunk staring at the strings of light overhead. They were oddly colored and inconsistent in their luminosity, giving the tunnel a surreal feeling. It was almost like they weren't meant to be lights at all, like the glow was secondary to their primary function.

What _was_  this place?

He didn't know, but they couldn't stay here. Shay picked herself back up, helped Hunk to his feet, and they started walking again. Inch by inch. One step at a time.

It seemed to take forever, and Hunk's head was spinning by the time the elevator shaft came into view. Hunk dropped onto the platform gratefully, leaning back against the wire mesh railing as Shay got them moving. She bowed over the controls once they were in motion, cradling her injured arm, one leg bouncing restlessly as she hummed through clenched teeth.

"We're almost out," Hunk said. "We're almost there."

Almost, except for the impossible distance they had yet to travel, an unending black shaft stretching out above them into eternity. How long had it taken them to get down here? Ten minutes? Twenty? Hunk didn't know if he was going to last that long, or if he would have the strength to stand and walk out into the open once the elevator stopped. Yellow would be out there, just out of reach, probably frantic with worry.

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he heard her, throwing herself at the too-small mouth of the cave, clawing her way toward him.

His head was spinning, now, the poison in the air finally catching up to him. He'd lasted longer than he had any right to, on a planet like this. Must have been the adrenaline.

He reached out for Shay's hand, pulled her down beside him. "I love you," he whispered. "I hope you know that."

She smiled, leaning her head on his shoulder. "I have always known that. I love you as well."

He smiled, closing his eyes against a sudden light, yellow-tinged and painfully bright, from somewhere far overhead. There were voices in the distance, and pounding footsteps... A roar, panicked and pained.

Hunk found it hard to care about any of that. He'd fought this long, but he couldn't fight anymore.

He gave in, and let sleep have him.

* * *

Matt didn't know what had happened.

He knew something had changed, because he wasn't where he should have been, but he was having trouble stringing all the pieces together. He'd been with Keith. There had been a fight. A creature twice as tall as he was, panicked and ready to kill.

A spark of light, a suggestion of pain.

In an instant, he was...somewhere else. A gentle slope beneath a cloudy sky. A garden overlooked by verdant mountains and a hush that felt like a companion at his side. The halls of the Garrison, but smaller and duller than what Matt remembered. The cockpit of a plane Matt didn't recognize, though he felt as though he ought to. Below him was an endless sea, profoundly blue and glittering where the sun caught the waves.

A rocky outcropping amid a sea of lava.

Matt didn't remember his last visit to the Heart of the Red Lion, but both Nyma and Akira had testified to the destruction caused by Red's mortal wound. They'd seen deep fissures cut through the terrain, gaps in the fabric of this plane. Matt saw evidence of those fissures still, though they'd closed in the interim. Darker and smoother than the other stone, they looked like scars, and they shone in the light of the lava flowing over them, the red glow bleeding across the polished surface.

Venturing closer to the nearest scar, Matt crouched down and ran a hand over the stone. It looked like obsidian, glassy smooth with a reflection so clear it almost seemed he was looking through a window onto another sky. Part of him was afraid to step on it, for fear that it would shatter under his weight.

He lifted his head, a hint of thunder on the wind drawing his attention toward the horizon, and he caught sight of a figure in the distance.

"Red?" he called, testing his weight on the glassy scar before striking out. The figure in the distance rippled like a mirage, but they didn't seem to have heard his call. "Red! What's happening?"

This time, Red heard him and turned, frowning. "Is someone there?"

Despite the distance between them, Matt heard Red's voice as clear as if they'd spoken in his ear. At the same time, though, it seemed to come from far away, echoing and somehow hollow. Red continued to turn, scanning the horizon, and when their eyes locked, Matt stopped breathing.

"Akira."

He didn't know how he knew it; they were still too far apart for Matt to have told the color of Akira's eyes, to see if the strange, luminous markings still dotted his skin. But it didn't matter. One fleeting glance, and Matt knew. That wasn't Red.

The terrain bled away as Matt ran for Akira, distance as meaningless as a dream in this space, and he blew past new scars with every pounding beat of his heart.

"Akira!"

He reached out as he neared Akira, and sudden recognition lit Akira's eyes. "Matt?"

Matt crashed into him--passed _through_ him, and the world tilted on its axis as he stumbled to a stop, lava pulled at his shoes. He spun, a headache throbbing behind his eyes, and found Akira again, just where he'd been before, still watching Matt with as much confusion as must have shown on Matt's face.

Matt extracted himself from the lava flow and approached Akira more slowly, his eyes searching for the trick. Even at this close range, Akira still had that mirage quality to him, shimmering and translucent, and though they reached out at the same time to clasp hands, they passed right through each other.

"What's happening?" Matt asked. "Akira? That is you, right?"

Akira opened his mouth, then suddenly turned, captivated by something behind him. Motion drew Matt's eye in the same direction--but the motion wasn't in the air, or across the ground.

It was _under_ the ground--a reflection in the glassy surface of the obsidian scar, a storm front of roiling crimson clouds crackling with lightning that had no counterpart in the sky overhead.

Matt glanced down, and stumbled back when he realized that Akira's reflection was far clearer than Matt's--clearer than the mirage standing before Matt.

"Akira?" Matt asked. "Where are you? What...?"

He trailed off as Akira stepped back, his smile turning strained. "I'm not sure. Doesn't matter, though. I won't stick around for long."

"What?"

Akira shook his head. "Nothing. What happened? Did it work--is Red okay?"

Matt's breath stuck in his throat. "Is Red--? Red's fine. _You're_ the one we're worried about."

Akira glanced again over his shoulder at the storm, which was rapidly advancing, honing in on Akira like it was attuned to him somehow. He turned back to Matt, flashed a crooked smile. "Me? You don't need to worry about me. I've got this." Lightning split the reflected sky, a boom of thunder making Matt's ears ache, and Akira spun. He backed away from the storm, the mirage of him passing straight through Matt. Matt grabbed at the illusion, chased after the reflection.

"Akira. _Akira._ "

Akira looked down--his reflection looking up at Matt, and there was an electric charge this time when their eyes met, something sparking in the bond that Matt hadn't felt since Akira took on Red's spirit.

"Win the war," Akira said. "Stop Zarkon. Stop Keturah. That's all I want."

"No. Akira--"

But the storm was upon them now, static in the air raising the hairs on Matt's arms. A gale Matt couldn't feel caught Akira's hair, his clothes. He backed away, raised an arm to shield his eyes from the wind.

Within a few moments, the clouds had reached Matt's feet. They boiled beneath the surface of the obsidian scar, and Matt's head spun. He turned, stumbling as he lost his balance, and watched in horror as the storm swirled around Akira, swallowing him up. The mirage closed his eye, ducked his head down behind his raised arms. The mirage flickered once, fuzzing like a staticy TV screen.

Matt returned to himself with a jolt, opening his eyes to find Akira's face inches from his own.

No.

Not Akira. Matt's heart plummeted as his mind caught up with him. That wasn't Akira. Not here. Not with those gold eyes and the speckled red markings across his skin.

"Red," he said, his tongue thick and his mind slow to catch up with him. "What happened? Where--?"

"Infirmary."

Shiro appeared over Red's shoulder, and Red glanced in his general direction briefly before stepping aside. Considering they'd been the one supporting Matt, that left him swaying on his feet, knees about ready to buckle as the room around him spun. Shiro darted in and caught him before he fell, and Matt shivered as cold air puffed against his ankles.

His grip on Shiro's arm tightened as realization set in. "Oh."

"Yeah." Shiro helped him straighten, shifting to the side so Pidge, Karen, and Keith had better access.

"Why'd you have to go and use fire, idiot?" Pidge demanded, punching him in the ribs. "That entire planet's one big firetrap waiting for a spark. I'd  _just_ told Lance that when you went and lit yourself up like the Fourth of July. You're lucky you didn't burn yourself to a crisp!"

Matt caught their fist as they tried for a second punch. "First of all, ow. I just came out of a cryopod. Give a guy a break, would you? Second... Sorry. I wasn't thinking."

"Clearly."

Matt scowled, but Pidge fell against him, apparently having satisfied their need to scold him. He wrapped his arm around their shoulders and lifted his gaze to his mom. "Was it that bad?"

"Only minor burns," she said. "Bruises. Your armor did its job, and the explosion burned itself out quickly. The real issue was that you broke the seal on your helmet. Almost suffocated before we could get you in a pod."

"Shit..."

Keith edged closer, hovering near Karen's shoulder. His arms were crossed tight over his chest, his eyes staring fixedly at the floor. "You're okay now, though? Coran says it's been a long time since they needed the pods for something like this. He'll want to know if you're not breathing right."

Matt breathed a few times, searching for any tightness in his chest, any sense that he wasn't getting enough air. "I think I'm okay. Sorry for screwing up the mission."

Shiro snorted. "Please. Don't take all the credit. That entire mission was a disaster from start to finish."

Karen touched his arm, offering a sympathetic grimace. "You got everyone out. That's what matters."

Matt looked between them, grim suspicion creeping in between his ribs. He turned to Keith. "What happened? Is everyone okay?"

"They will be," Keith said. "Most of us already are. Shiro and Allura are the only ones who didn't at least wind up on bed rest for all of yesterday."

They laid it out for him, every bullet point somehow worse than the last. A Quintessence-draining superweapon beneath the city, leaving Lance, Meri, and Nyma so drained they _still_  weren't up for more than an hour or two of activity at a time--and it had been almost two full days. Pidge and Val hadn't been exposed to the weapon for as long, so they'd bounced back faster, and Keith...

Well, Keith didn't seem to want to talk about what had happened to him, and the others followed his lead. It didn't sound like he'd had to spend any time in the pods, though.

Luckily for him. Coran had finally got a few other infirmaries up and running, so he would have had somewhere to go--it just would have been out in the middle of nowhere, away from all the other paladins. All six of the pods in the main infirmary had already been claimed, it seemed.

Matt stared at them, one by one, as Shiro filled in the last few pieces.

"It was the adjunct bond." He glanced at Karen as he spoke, as though waiting for her to correct him. "We don't know all the details, but Karen was able to confirm that much for us."

"But even I don't know how it's possible," she finished. "Hunk and Shay were the ones trapped in the cave-in. They're the ones who were breathing that air for the better part of an hour. But somehow Lana, Akani, and Eli wound up in almost as bad a state."

Matt shook his head. "You mean _actually_  wounded," he said. "Real, physiological symptoms of chlorine gas inhalation and whatever else."

"That's the thing," Shiro said, stepping up beside Matt and watching Eli breathe inside his pod. "Symptoms, yes. Akani and Lana called the infirmary complaining of severe pain, and by the time we got them down here, they were having trouble breathing. Eli tried to get himself here and collapsed on the way. Couldn't move his legs, wasn't breathing well. We're lucky we found him when we did. But... for all the symptoms--the pain, the shortness of breath, the wheezing... There was nothing wrong with them. Not that we could find on the scans. No broken bones, no internal injuries. Their lungs were clean."

"We ended up sticking them in a pod for lack of any other options," Karen said. "Put them in Stage II stasis. It stabilized them, and as best we can tell, it helped Hunk and Shay hold on a little longer, too. At this point, we're only waiting until Hunk and Shay are healed before we bring them out. We can't be sure if the shared symptoms would come back at this point or not."

Matt shivered. "And Hunk and Shay?"

Shiro shook his head. "They're already better than any of us dared to hope. It was... It was ugly, Matt, I'm not going to lie. I don't know how the hell Hunk managed to climb out of that cavern in the state he was in, but somehow he managed to avoid irreparable damage to the spinal cord. We're still not sure if that was the adjunct bond or just incredibly good luck."

"His back," Matt said, tasting bile. "Was it broken?"

"Fractured two vertebrae." Shiro paused. "And his pelvis. Like I said, Matt--either the adjunct bond is more powerful than any of us would have guessed, or Hunk got lucky. It could have been so much worse. They could have _died_ down there."

"But they didn't," Karen said, the warmth in her voice cushioning the steel as she laid a hand on Shiro's arm. "They got themselves out of that cavern, and you got them back here, and they're all going to be _fine._ Aside from Hunk's back, their injuries were surprisingly minor. Shay shattered her wrist, but other than that it was mostly bumps and bruises."

Matt breathed out, his heart fluttering in his chest. "Holy fuck."

Shiro choked on a laugh, his eyes still drawn to the Kahales' silent figures. He looked haunted, and Matt couldn't blame him. "They've come a long way already. We're still waiting on the lungs and airways, and Hunk's back, but that's all. Last estimate I heard was another two days."

Matt cursed again, more emphatically than before. "Jesus. And I thought _I_ had it bad."

"You did," Pidge said. They were still latched onto his waist, content to be dragged along wherever Matt went, and he didn't have the heart to dislodge them.

Nor did he have the heart to mention what he'd seen in the Heart. Akira. Alive.

_Maybe._

Red was still lurking at the edge of the room, watching Matt intently. Did they know what he'd seen? Or was it just that they'd almost lost him, and now they were worried?

He needed to talk to them, either way. Find out how much they knew, and whether they'd been deliberately hiding it from him. But that would have to wait. He didn't want Keith or Shiro there when he confronted them. Not because he cared whether or not it made them hate Red more; he was just terrified of finding out that what he'd seen was no more than an echo of Akira, part of the fragments still integrating with Red. A ghost.

No, Matt would talk to them alone, and then--once he was sure, once it didn't feel so fragile-- _then_  he would tell the others.


	24. Resonance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... A disastrous mission to the planet Klenahn landed half the team in cryopods--but no one was more seriously wounded than Hunk and Shay, who were caught in a cave-in and only survived because Yellow used the adjunct bonds to mitigate their wounds. Matt, who was also badly wounded, wound up in the Heart of the Red Lion, where he briefly spoke with Akira.

Hunk woke stiff and achy, but surprisingly clear-headed after a stay in the cryopods. Clear-headed enough to wonder what he was doing lying down.

"Hunk, my boy!" Coran blustered into sight, a tablet nestled in the crook of his arm. He consulted it, then hung it from a clip on his belt and helped Hunk sit up. "How are you feeling?"

"Little dizzy," Hunk said, pressing a hand to his head. He swung his feet over the side of the... table?… and stopped there to adjust; he was in no hurry to pass out. "Is this a pod? Since when do they turn sideways?"

"Since always!" Coran grinned.

Hunk frowned. "And, what? Do Alteans _enjoy_ almost face-planting after a medical emergency?"

"Of course not. I always forget how wobbly other species are."

"I feel like I should be offended by that."

Coran patted his shoulder, then grabbed his tablet and waved in front of Hunk--that peculiar motion he had that somehow yielded a full-body scan. "Those pods were designed for Alteans first, but it turns out Alteans have a better sense of balance than most of the universe. You're lucky we have the newer models here on the castle-ship. Two models older and you wouldn't even _have_ this option!"

Hunk leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees. "And... why are you just now telling us about it? We could have been doing this the whole time!"

"Would you like me to mark a preference in your chart?"

Hunk opened his mouth, then shut it again. "You can do that?"

Coran finalized the scan with a flourish and tapped a few times. He paused, tilting the tablet fractionally toward Hunk with an inquisitive grunt.

"Sure, fine. Yes." Hunk waited for Coran to finish before going on. "So... what's different about this time that you decided to break with tradition?"

Coran had a good poker face, but he seemed rattled today--too focused on the tablet, carefully avoiding Hunk's eyes and muttering over whatever he saw on the scans. Hunk's heart began to pound.

"Coran?"

"Hunk!"

Hunk started to turn, but Akani crashed into him before he caught sight of her. She flung her arms around his neck and squeezed, and Hunk's lungs strained at the pressure. He hooked his chin over his mama's shoulder--and suddenly realized he wasn't the only one who'd just come out of a pod. Allura was checking over Shay, and Karen had pulled a blanket around Lana's shoulders while Shiro steadied Eli, who still seemed a little dazed.

Hunk pulled back, blanching as he realized Akani, too, was wearing the bland white medsuit. He spun toward Coran.

"What happened? Mama--?" He looked at her again. "What _happened_? Are you okay? Why were you in the pod?"

Akani opened her mouth, then paused there, shooting a silent plea for help at Coran, who sighed, stepped back, and cleared his throat.

"I'm sure you all have some questions. We might as well all get them answered together."

A hush fell over the room as Shiro, Allura, and Karen ushered the Kahales and Shay toward Hunk's bench. It seemed he was the only one whose pod had spit him out lying down, and only Hunk and his moms fit comfortably. Allura extended a bench against the nearest wall for Eli and Shay, who sat silently, Shay somewhat stiff until Eli put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her into a one-armed hug.

Coran tapped his tablet against his hand, seemingly searching for the right way to begin. "I'm not sure how much any of you remember, considering... what happened."

"What _did_ happen?" Lana asked. "I know it was bad--even before I passed out, I knew it was bad. I don't remember a lot, but I remember pain. I remember not being able to breathe."

Hunk looked to her, his anxiety rearing his head. "Wait, what? When was this? What happened?"

"It happened right about the time you two were being crushed by a collapsing cavern," Coran said. He breathed in, perhaps expecting an outburst, but Hunk was too stunned to say anything--and the fact that neither of his mothers seemed at all surprised by Coran's statement wasn't helping matters.

"It was the bond," Karen offered. "Yellow somehow... _spread out_ the wounds."

"Spread out..." Hunk shook his head. "What does that mean?" He looked around the room, glancing from Karen to Coran to Shiro and Allura and then back to each of his moms. "Are you telling me you were in those pods because of me?"

Akani squeezed his hand to quiet him. "Endurance," she said. "That's what Yellow promised us... and what she asked of us in return."

Hunk's hand was shaking now, but he couldn't make himself pull it away.

Coran squared his shoulders. "We don't know how it works. What we do know is that Hunk and Shay would almost certainly be dead without the adjunct bond."

Akani's hand tightened around Hunk's, crushing his fingers in a spasm. "What?" she asked, her voice impossibly small.

Coran laid it all out for them, in excruciating detail. The pain and stress Hunk’s family had suffered--trouble breathing, trouble _walking_ , and all the pain Hunk himself hadn’t felt. Enough to land them all in cryopods.

Even worse were the actual injuries. Hunk had broken his back and his pelvis. Shay had shattered her wrist. They’d both had concussions, and had been breathing toxic air for nearly an hour. Hunk struggled to wrap his head around it, but try as he might, he couldn’t get the words to parse. A broken _back?_ Surely Coran was exaggerating. That was the sort of thing you heard about in the news, not the sort of thing you experienced first-hand.

A stunned silence followed Coran’s speech.

He tapped the tablet to darken the screen and returned it to his belt. "My point is, they should have asphyxiated well before the thirty minute mark, but not only did they survive twice that time, they dug themselves out and got close enough to the surface for Shiro to find them and bring them home. _And_ their wounds healed faster than they should have. You all were only under for five days. I was anticipating two weeks, assuming a full recovery was even possible."

"And it's because of the adjunct bond," Hunk finished. "The adjunct bond that almost _killed_ my family."

Lana turned toward him, frowning. "Hunk--"

"I didn't agree to this," he said, pulling away from her and lurching to his feet. For the briefest of moments, he felt unsteady, and his back twinged in not-quite-pain as he fought for his balance. He found it before anyone could reach out to steady him. "I don't want you putting yourselves in danger for us."

"Well I _do_ ," Lana said. "You heard Coran, Hunk--you could have _died_. We could have _lost you_. If all it costs me is a couple of days and a little bit of a scare, that's a price I'll gladly pay, just as long as it means I get you home in one piece."

Hunk shook his head, but Akani was on her feet now, shushing him as she wrapped him in an embrace. He fought it while he could, but once Lana joined in on it, the battle was over.

"You've been through a lot," Shiro said, laying a hand against Hunk's back. "And you're taking the next two weeks off-- _minimum._ Take some time to process. We'll call the whole team together in a few days and go from there."

* * *

A week after the Klenahn disaster, Allura received a call from Kolivan.

“I’m sorry, I think I misheard you,” she said, her heart a block of ice in her chest as she stared Kolivan down. He’d asked to speak in private, and Allura had obliged, figuring he wanted to talk strategy or pass along sensitive information from the Accords.

She hadn’t expected _this._

Kolivan only pressed his lips together. “You heard correctly.”

“Keena,” Allura said. “Didn’t show up. How does that _happen_?”

“We didn’t exactly send an armed guard to retrieve her,” Kolivan said dryly. “She is proud and pragmatic, and we expected her to return to New Altea without trouble, if only so she could plead her case in hopes of regaining her former station. Apparently she would rather cut her losses and start fresh somewhere beyond our reach.”

Allura pinched the bridge of her nose. Keena had left the castle-ship a little more than a week ago. With the defensive zone surrounding New Altea, it would have taken her at least three days to arrive. Four wouldn’t have been unusual, and five might have raised some eyebrows, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. But a _week?_

“When did you lose contact with her?”

“We last spoke shortly after she left the Castle of Lions. She sent a transmission confirming that she was on her way--I suppose in order to pacify us and delay the discovery of her flight. We pinged her once when she should have been half a day out, then again when she missed her anticipated arrival time. She has yet to respond to either, and we can’t force our calls through.”

“So you have no idea where she is,” Allura said.

Kolivan shook his head. “Rest assured, we are looking, but I thought it prudent to pass the message along. If she’s cutting ties, it means she has other plans--plans that don’t require the Coalition or the Accords. I would keep your eye out for signs of her meddling.”

“Of course,” Allura said. “We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

She told the Holts straight away, of course. What else was she going to do, let Keith find out through the rumor mill? Matt looked ready to go out himself to look for Keena, and Pidge was already neck-deep in one program or another, looking for signs of Keena’s activity. Even Karen, who remained outwardly calm, looked ready to draw blood if Keena dared show her face again.

Keith, though, hardly said a word. Thanked Allura for the heads up, like she’d told him they were going to have extra training after dinner, then walked out.

Allura might have been less concerned if he’d exploded in a fury, but Matt was already heading after him, so Allura left them to it.

She had other problems to deal with, anyway.

Coran had put most of the paladins on light duty following the close calls on Klenahn, and Allura happened to agree with his decision; severe Quintessence drain was no small thing, to say nothing of the respiratory damage, burns, and internal injuries Matt, Hunk, and Shay had sustained. The healing pods were amazing things, but they did not fix everything.

Of course, the other paladins didn't want to accept that reality. They _felt_ fine, so they resented being kept off of missions this week. It didn’t matter that there wasn't much that needed doing. The Vkullor and Dark Voltron both remained out of play, and Shiro and Allura delegated most jobs to the Guard or to other Coalition forces and took the rest on themselves. Keith, Pidge, and Val were cleared to join them by the time Hunk and Shay emerged from the pods, and Matt and Lance joined them just a few days later.

They held the line like that for the rest of the week, going out in pairs or all together. Allura would be the first to acknowledge that it was paranoia, plain and simple. Those who had been cleared to return to active duty were as competent as ever, and the distress calls and tactical strikes they were doing were no more dangerous now than they had been last week. But after nearly losing so many of her friends in a single mission, Allura was in no mood to take chances. Nor, it seemed, was Shiro.

So they doubled down and took it slow and made sure no one ever went anywhere alone. And if Matt was irritated by what he perceived to be hovering, Lance at least seemed to understand.

Hunk and Shay, on the other hand, were entirely done with the coddling. Just a few short days after emerging from the pod, they were ready to dive back into the action.

"You need rest," Shiro said. "I know you don't like sitting around, but if you push yourself too hard, too soon, you could re-injure yourselves, and that will put you out of the action for even longer."

"But we're _fine_ ," Hunk said. "Coran has us doing all this physical therapy and whatever, but we don't need it. I haven't had _any_ issues with my back since I came out of the pod."

"You haven't had them," Allura asked, "or you haven't _felt_ them?"

Hunk shut his mouth with a snap, apparently uncertain how to respond to that.

Allura sighed, consciously easing her posture as she crossed the bridge to where Hunk stood, Shay at his shoulder. Allura and Shiro had been reviewing calls, planning out the day, when the other two arrived and demanded to be put back in the field.

"Hunk," she said, taking him by the shoulders. "We're still trying to figure out how the adjunct bond works. Obviously you didn't feel as much pain as you should have when you were in that cavern--and obviously you were able to dig yourselves out, to _climb_ out, when I'm not sure the rest of us could have done the same. But we don't know the limits of the bond. It could be that the bond has helped you sustain a full recovery much quicker than anticipated, yes--but it's just as likely that your adjuncts are siphoning off pain and stiffness that otherwise would signal to you that you're not fully healed. Until we know that, we can't take any chances."

Hunk huffed. "I get that, but--"

"You injured your back, Hunk," Shiro said. "That's not something we can take lightly, especially when it would be so easy to re-injure it during a mission. What happens if you twist wrong in the middle of battle, or strain yourself lifting something, or have to do maintenance on Yellow during a fight in the air and get thrown against a railing? Even a slight injury at this point could have serious ramifications--ramifications the pods may not be able to fix this time around."

“So we’re supposed to just sit around, twiddling our thumbs?” Hunk asked. “Come on. It hasn’t even been a week and I’m already going crazy.”

"Then why don't you take a visit to Theros?" Allura suggested. "I'm sure Shay's parents would love to see her, and it might take your minds off your recovery."

It was a diversion and nothing more, and Hunk and Shay both clearly saw that--but they also saw that Allura wasn’t going to budge on this. After a few minutes of hemming and hawing, they relented, and Allura breathed a sigh as they went to pack their bags.

* * *

Matt found Red down in the hangar, as usual. He hadn’t exactly sought them out a whole lot since they'd taken over Akira's body, but they hardly seemed to leave the hangar. Every time he came here, he found them. Every time he and Keith needed to leave on a mission, Red was already down here, ready and waiting. He never saw them on the residential floor, never saw them on the training deck or in the kitchens or on the bridge.

Were they even eating anymore? Matt honestly didn't know.

Well, they didn't seem to have lost any weight, so Matt tried not to think about it. Besides, he had more important things to worry about.

"RED!"

There was a thud as Red, who had been dozing on one of the cots at the back of the cockpit, jumped and slammed their elbow into the wall. They cursed and cradled their arm, rubbing it as they sat up and glared at Matt. "Jesus, Matt," they said. "Be a little louder next time."

Matt ignored them and stormed over, only stopping when he was within a foot of Red's knees. "Akira's still in there."

Red tensed, staring at Matt's feet for a long moment before lifting their head to glare at him directly. "This again? I told you, we're the same person now. So, _yeah_ , he's still 'in here,' I guess. But not the way you want."

"No," Matt said, struggling for calm. "I mean, _Akira_. _My_ Akira, not whatever version of him you think you are. The real Akira is still alive. I saw him. I _talked_ with him."

For just a moment, Red’s disinterested air evaporated. They looked up, eyes wide--almost alarmed. "What? _When_?"

"After I passed out on Klenahn. I wound up in the Heart, and Akira was there." Matt searched Red's face for... he didn't know what. Something that Red wouldn't admit out loud. Answers about what had really happened to Akira. "You knew."

Red leaned back--an attempt at nonchalance that reeked too much of guilt. "Knew what?"

"That he's in there! That he's--trapped, or something. He was like a mirage, and the real him was underground."

"Under...ground." Red breathed slowly, relaxed by fractions, arched an eyebrow. "Are you _sure_ you saw what you think you saw?"

Matt clenched his jaw, his hand twitching, aching to punch Red square in the nose. "I know what I saw. What I don't know is whether you're lying to me or just confused."

Red stared him in the eye, their mouth pressed into a thin line and their face otherwise expressionless. "What, exactly, is it you think I lied about? I told you Akira wasn't destroyed when we merged, and he wasn't. I told you the lines between 'Red' and 'Akira' are thin, at best--and I don't know if you saw Akira or only an echo of him, but if you were in the Heart, then... where do you think he came from? He's another facet of my soul now."

"If that's true, then why don't you remember it?"

Red opened their mouth, but no words came out. They stared at Matt, and their expression slowly soured. "You're grasping at straws," they muttered, turning abruptly and lying down once more on their cot. "Think whatever you want, but don't blame me when it turns out this isn't what you were hoping for."

Matt snorted, but it was obvious he wasn't getting anything more out of Red on the subject. He didn't get why they were being so stubborn about this--or why they were being so evasive, for that matter. There was more they weren't saying. It wasn't as simple as _Akira is gone_ or _Akira is me_ or anything else Red had tried to get him to believe.

And that meant there was still a chance.

He found Shiro and Keith on the training deck, engrossed in a heated spar--unarmed. Keith had been in that sort of a mood lately. Said he wanted to feel it in a way you just didn't get with swords. Unfortunately, the gladiators weren't the best hand-to-hand opponents, being primarily programmed with staves and swords. You _could_ take them on unarmed, but only an Altean could do so without simply amassing a collection of aches and bruises that came as a result of punching metal.

Matt stopped just inside the door, letting it slide closed behind him as he watched Keith and Shiro move about the room. There were still elements of the Arena in Shiro's fighting style--things Matt could pick out despite never having witnessed those fights. There was the obvious, sure--the control behind every motion, the way he was aware of the entire room. It took him less than two seconds to notice Matt's arrival, and he gave a slight nod before turning back to Keith.

But there were subtle things, too. Keith's fighting style was fundamentally disciplined, even when he applied it recklessly. He'd trained in combat with the Empire since he was a child, which meant there was a coherent form to his attacks, his blocks, his posture--and when he broke with his training, it was obvious.

Shiro's style was self-taught. It was the style of a survivor--unconventional and unpredictable. It was easy for Shiro to catch Keith off guard, even now. Keith reacted well, and sparring with Shiro for a year had taught him to be ready for anything, but the simple fact was, Shiro adapted to the situation, zeroing in on weakness every time. He was an opportunistic fighter, quick on his feet and able to change tact in an instant. Every attack was confident, precise, and impeccably controlled--but Matt suspected the vast majority were moves Shiro himself had developed of necessity while trying to stay alive.

Which wasn't to say Keith was entirely outmatched. He was stubborn and tenacious and just as quick as Shiro. They must have been sparring for a while already, because Keith had reached the point in the battle where he threw his training out the window and started to improvise. It was a vice he and Matt shared--riskier than was probably smart, but sometimes that was what you needed. If you went down, you went down hard, but if you were quick and smart and a little bit lucky, you could end the battle fast.

Today, unfortunately, luck was not in Keith's favor. With Shiro, it rarely was. Keith only won about a third of their sparring matches, and today was not one of them. Shiro managed to get him off balance and soon carried him to the ground, pinning him surely enough that Keith soon yielded the match.

Only when he sat up did he notice that Matt had joined them.

"Hey," he said, easily catching the water pouch Matt tossed his way. "Come to get in on the fun?"

Matt snorted. "Maybe later. No, I actually just came from talking with Red."

Shiro grabbed a towel from a second compartment on the wall and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. "You two are talking again," he said. There was a note of surprise in his words, but he did manage to keep it judgment-free. Matt almost wished he hadn't. They hadn't talked a lot about Red since...everything, and it was hard to tell what Shiro's opinion of them was. Matt had sort of assumed Shiro was as upset with them as Matt was, considering it was Shiro's brother who had given himself up and all.

But the way Shiro got so quiet on the rare occasion Matt started ranting, Matt almost had to wonder whether he wasn't disappointed in Matt for taking it all out on Red like this.

He shifted his weight, avoiding Shiro's gaze as he scratched the back of his neck. "Eh... sorta. We're still not exactly on the best of terms, but I needed to ask them something."

Keith cocked his head to the side, his ears swiveling like he was a cat stalking prey. "Oh?"

Matt drew in a deep breath. "I saw Akira in the Heart."

Shiro froze, his hands tightening on the towel to the point that Matt actually heard the fibers start to tear. "What?"

"Yeah. On Klenahn, when I got knocked out? I wound up in the Heart. Akira was there, all--" He waved his hand. "I don't know. It's like he wasn't all there, but he recognized me. He asked if it had worked--if Red was okay."

"Of course he did," Keith muttered.

Matt's lips twitched. "I told him he was an idiot and that we were all worried about _him._ " His smile slipped. "He said not to worry, but there was this... storm, I guess. I don’t know. I lost sight of Akira, and then I woke up in the pod room. I didn't say anything because I wanted to talk to Red first. Make sure I wasn't imagining things or something."

"And they said it was real?" Shiro asked, his voice low and taut. "They said he was still in there?"

"No it so many words..."

Shiro's brow furrowed.

Matt sighed, spreading his arms. "Red's as tight-lipped as ever. But I _do_ know that they don't remember anything, which means it _had_ to have been Akira I talked to!"

Matt reached out for Shiro, but he took a sudden step back, putting himself just out of arm's reach. Matt faltered.

"Shiro?"

For a second, something like anger flashed across Shiro's face--dark and turbulent and gone as quickly as it appeared. Matt blinked, and Shiro was back to careful neutrality, forcing a smile as he tossed his towel into the chute to be cleaned.

"Sorry," he said. "I just remembered I was supposed to meet with Allura to go over something."

He was gone before Matt could say any more, slipping by him and out into the hallway and leaving a hollow silence in his wake.

* * *

From the moment Shay set foot on Theros, Hunk and his family behind her, she knew something had changed. Theros was stronger, yes, her Quintessence more vibrant than ever before. Time and her proximity to other Balmera would do that. The song, too, was richer, as though Theros had picked up a few strains of the other Balmeras' songs. It made Shay feel a stranger for the briefest of moments, before the familiar voices and melodies of home reasserted themselves.

Her parents were waiting to greet her, crushing her in an embrace that left no question as to whether or not they knew the full extent of what had happened. Shay had spoken with them since recovering, of course, but she had skirted the details to spare them the worry.

The effort, it seemed, had been for nothing.

"Apologies," she whispered, the song rising so high it strangled her voice. "I never meant to worry you. Are you well?"

"You know that we are," her mother said, pressing her forehead to Shay's. "We suffered nothing worse than our fear for your safety. A few aches. Fatigue. All that is in the past by now." Shay knew that already, of course. After what had happened to Hunk's family, Coran had checked on Shay's parents first thing, as had Shay herself once she'd emerged from the pod. Had they suffered the same symptoms as Hunk's family, there was no telling what might have happened--with no pods to stabilize them, to help them breathe--

Fortunately, it seemed Yellow had not distributed the wounds evenly among her adjuncts. She'd tried to explain it, how she'd put more on the Kahales because she knew they had aid close at hand. It had been an instinctive thing, rather than a conscious decision, but it had spared Shay's parents great danger, and for that, Shay was grateful.

Shay's father grabbed Hunk in an embrace that was every bit as fervent as the one he'd given Shay. "And the two of you? I hear no pain in your songs. And you are upright. That is good, yes?"

"Eh..." Hunk bobbed his head side to side. "Depends on who you ask. I say we're fine. Shiro and Allura want us resting for a couple more _weeks_."

"They suggested we take the chance to visit you," Shay said. "And to use the visit as a distraction so the recovery does not feel so long."

Shay's parents traded looks, amusement entering into their song. "Then come," her father said. "Let us see if we can find a suitable distraction for you."

* * *

"You know you're supposed to be resting, right?" Val asked as she made herself comfortable in Blue's cockpit. The lion rumbled around her, part reproach, part amusement.

Nyma only scoffed and dropped into Lance's usual seat with a cavalier attitude that almost managed to mask how invested she was in this. "This _again_? Val. Please. Did you need the whole week Shiro and Allura forced on you, or were you better in half the time?"

Val couldn't argue with that, really--but then again, she'd lost only a fraction of the Quintessence Nyma had, _and_ she produced her own surplus. There was a reason she'd recovered more quickly than Nyma.

But, true. Shiro and Allura were being, if anything, overly cautious in the wake of the disaster that was Klenahn. Val could have returned to the field days ago, and Nyma was nearly there, if not already fully recovered. Just because Shiro and Allura didn't want to take chances didn't mean that Nyma wasn't up to a little trans-universal bilocation.

...Which was good, because today marked their third attempt to catch Rolo out of his body.

Nyma hadn't specifically said that she wanted to talk to Rolo about something, but when they made their first jump five days ago, only to find Rolo, Sam, Rax, and an unnervingly-still Zuza huddled together in their cell, completely oblivious to their astral visitors, Nyma had come out of it far more tense than she'd been going in.

Granted, the same could be said of Val, but that had more to do with Zuza's condition. There was nothing normal about that, which had to mean something had happened. So Nyma could keep her secrets; Val was going back in the hope that she would get the chance to talk to someone and find out what was wrong.

She descended into the Heart without complaint; she'd figured out how to direct herself to Green's Heart even from Blue. They were, as she'd always known, connected, and as she gained more experience traveling between the physical and astral realms, she found she was better able to control her movements. She touched down briefly in Green's Heart before traveling to the island, where Nyma was waiting for her.

Nyma gave her an odd look as she appeared; wondering why she always stopped by Green's Heart first. She hadn't asked yet but here in the Heart, she didn't _need_  to ask--likewise, she probably already knew that Val didn't have an answer for her. Going through Green, at first, had been a way to be sure that whatever she managed would be replicable with Pidge. Now, though?

It was habit, and maybe a little bit of superstition. She'd never bilocated to Rolo or Sam without Green's help. She probably _could_ have, but it was such a simple thing, she didn't want to risk it.

They headed for the tower together, reaching out in silence. Val sent them skimming across the universe, out toward the distant light that was Rolo.

This time, they got lucky.

Val felt it as soon as they arrived. They weren't in the cell, for one. Weren't in the lion, either. It looked to be a corridor of some kind, dimly lit and deserted. It was new, but not immediately ominous, which Val took as a good sign. She turned, and found Sam, Rax, and Rolo all staring at her.

"Who are _you_?" Rax demanded, tensing like he expected a fight. Val wasn't sure how a fist fight would play out on the astral plane, but she wasn't eager to find out. She held her hands up, opening her mouth to explain, but Rolo was faster.

"Nyma." He hardly breathed her name, packing each syllable full of the same wonder and relief with which he'd greeted her the first time they'd bilocated to him. He surged forward, catching Nyma up in a hug, and Nyma melted against him, some of that tension she always carried bleeding away.

Val smiled at them, an impossible fondness making her chest ache. It took her several seconds to remember Rax, who still looked wary and expectant, if a little less combative than before.

"Sorry," Val said, stepping around Rolo and Nyma to give them a little privacy while she spoke with the others. "I guess we haven't formally met yet. I'm Val, one of the paladins."

Rax nodded. "The others told me about you. You brought Nyma and Pidge to see Rolo and Sam."

Val nodded, a pit growing in her stomach as Rax regarded her with something like hope. "I was able to bring the two of them because we're bonded to the same lion. I'm looking for a way to be able to do the same thing with all the paladins, so I can bring Shay, but I haven't figured it out yet."

At once, Rax's face closed off, and he nodded curtly. "Of course."

"Sorry," Val said, though the word rang hollow. "She wants it as much as you do, you know. She misses you."

A complicated series of emotions flickered across Rax's face before he turned away, apparently trying to gather his composure. Sam stepped into the silence, and Val let herself be diverted. Rax deserved his privacy, and she had questions for Sam anyway.

"How's Pidge?" he asked. "Matt? My wife?"

"They're good," Val said. "Worried about you, of course, but doing good." Apart from the part where Matt had almost blown himself up on Klenahn, but Sam didn't need to know about that right now. "Hey. So Nyma and I came around the other day. You guys were all in the cell, so we couldn't do anything to catch your attention or whatever, but... Zuza..."

Sam closed his eyes, his face pained. He nodded, and Val waited breathlessly while he gathered himself.

"They made her the pilot of the new Red Lion," he said. "Rushed her through the whole process just a few days ago, maybe a week. Stuck a master key device on her, and then left it on."

Val's breath left her in a rush. "No."

"We can't figure out why. They used her because they're out of options and in a hurry, sure, but why keep her under like that all the time? Why not do the same to the rest of us, if they think it helps their plan?"

"I don't know." Val glanced around the corridor--to Rax, who had recovered enough to turn around, though he still held himself distant from Val and Sam's conversation; to Rolo and Nyma who stood close together, whispering, Rolo's hands framing Nyma's face, Nyma holding onto his elbow uncertainly. "But I don't like it."

"Agreed." Sam shook his head. "It's good that you came, though. Make sure your team knows that Dark Voltron will be back in play soon. I think they're still finishing up their new Red Lion, but the hangars are too far for us to keep tabs on their progress. They could be done tonight for all we know."

"We'll be ready," Val said. "You just take care of yourselves. We're working on a way to get you out of here." She cocked her head to the side, considering him. "You can do this whenever you want, can't you? Enter the astral realm?"

Sam nodded, a shadow of a smile crossing his face. "It's the only way we've figured out as much as we have."

"Don't suppose you've stumbled across any coordinates since the last time we talked...?" Val wrinkled her nose as Sam shook his head. "Darn. So much for the easy solution." She squared her shoulders. "Doesn't matter. We'll figure something out."

A twinge in her gut warned her that her grip on this projection was slipping. She grunted, abandoning conversation in favor of focus and waved a hand to catch Nyma's attention.

Nyma looked up, cringed, and leaned her forehead against Rolo's, continuing on in the same hushed tones as before, albeit more frantically now. Val wondered what it was they were talking about, but only idly. Nyma would tell her or she wouldn't; either way, it was really none of Val's business.

Static started to crackle at the edges of her vision, and she raised her hand again, holding on just long enough for Nyma to say a hasty goodbye before the hallway winked out of existence.

* * *

The Migration had been busy.

Shay thought that, perhaps, Allura had been right in her assessment. Shay and Hunk were not yet back to the top of their game; if they were, they might have noticed that the Migration had three new members. Balmera--weak and emaciated Balmera, recently freed from Zarkon's control.

Shay stood with her family in a new chamber deep beneath Theros's surface, the walls coated with a fine layer of crystal that sparkled like stars. She could see the Migration in the reflection off these crystals--eleven Balmera of varying sizes, some healthier than others, their songs stronger, the glow of their heart crystals visible in whatever vision this was. Shay had never seen anything like it, and her parents had no explanation for it, other than that it was a gift from Theros.

"When?" she asked. "When did you have time for this?"

"And how'd you manage it?" Hunk added. "The free Balmerans have always been wary of provoking Zarkon's wrath; I can't imagine they'd be willing to storm an occupied Balmera, even if you had the weapons to take it back."

Shay's mother smiled. "We have no need of weapons in the sense you mean. The others--the free Balmerans--they have been teaching us. Teaching us their song, teaching us their magic."

Shay blinked. "Magic? What sort of magic do you mean?"

Her mother gave a mysterious smile and waved her out of the odd projection chamber through the far door. Crystals grew close to the surface here, but they were unlike the usual crystals--rather than a steady blue glow, the light here shifted, rippling like an aurora as Shay, Hunk, and their families followed a glittering trail on the tunnel floor.

They came, eventually, to another chamber that was unfamiliar to Shay. Perfectly round with a crystal in the center so large it seared her eyes, it seemed almost to have been shaped by hand. The floor was tiered, three concentric rings leading down to the central crystal, which grew from a bit of rock shaped like a pedestal.

Around the outer wall were twelve mirrored crystal panels, identical in shape and size to the tunnel opening through which they had entered. Shay frowned at these panels, even as she followed her parents down to the crystal.

"What is this place?" Hunk asked. "I've never seen anything like it."

"That is because Theros sealed it off when she was taken," Shay's father said. "All the Balmera who were captured did. The power contained in these chambers is far too great to ever be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. And it was only recently that Theros and the others regained the energy they need to sustain it."

"To sustain... what?" Eli asked.

"The original name is lost to us." Shay's mother smiled. "But we have decided to call them the resonant chambers."

As she spoke these final words, she placed a hand on the crystal and sang, her voice filling Shay's head, shivering in her bones. Theros's voice swelled in harmony--and after only a moment, another voice joined in, just as deep and rich as Theros's.

The crystal's glow suddenly intensified, washing over the chamber and stinging Shay's eyes. She ducked her head, but a trill of surprise and confusion in Hunk's song drew her attention. She looked up and followed Hunk's gaze. One of the crystal panels had disappeared, revealing a new tunnel.

The back of Shay's neck crawled as Theros's voice faded--and the other remained, stronger than ever. She turned back the way they had come and found the tunnel they had entered through was gone, replaced instead by a crystal panel identical to the rest.

She spun back toward her parents, certain that her shock was plain in the song.

"A Migration is one," her father said. "And travel among Balmera is a simple thing." He caressed the crystal, a look of reverence on his face. "Each member of this Migration is connected through these crystals and the chambers that house them, which shape themselves to fit the Migration."

Hunk cocked his head to the side. "So, what? Each of these tunnels takes you to a different Balmera in the Migration?"

Shay's mother nodded. "You need only sing to the Balmera you wish to visit; the Balmera themselves will carry your song."

"But..." Hunk pursed his lips. "There are thirteen doors here. Aren't there only twelve Balmera in the Migration?" He started to count them off on his fingers. "Metos, Theros, Atsiphos, the six surviving members of the Migration before you joined, and the three you've rescued since... That's twelve."

Shay's mother smiled. "For now."

"You have another target in mind, then?" Shay asked.

"We have already welcomed a thirteenth Balmera into the Migration. All that remains is to free her from Zarkon's control."

Shay raised a hand to cover her smile, her eyes going at once to seek out Hunk. He, too, was grinning in delight.

Shay suspected her vacation was not going to be as restful as Shiro and Allura had hoped.

* * *

Nyma stopped just outside Red's hangar door, wondering when, exactly, she'd lost her damn mind.

She didn't even know what she was doing here. Offering comfort to Red? What a joke. Red had made it perfectly clear they neither wanted nor needed comfort, pity, or friendship from anyone. And yet somehow, Nyma had got it into her head that not only was Red lying, but that it was _Nyma's_ job to fix it.

She'd been hanging around the other paladins too much. It was starting to go to her head.

But she _had_ gone through the trouble of asking Rolo for advice (sort of). And now she was here. Stalling.

She should just go in.

Maybe the stupidest thing of all was that the thing that finally got her moving was the thought that Rolo would be disappointed in her if she didn't go through with this. As though Rolo cared what happened with a shut-in lion halfway across the universe. As though he would ever even know.

But damn it all, Nyma didn't want to let him down, so she squared her shoulders, hit the door controls, and marched in. The Red Lion was sitting upright, head held high--less a sign that things were going well, Nyma thought, and more a tactic Red had devised to keep everyone else out.

"Red!" Nyma called, cupping her hands around her mouth. Back when Red had been the Red Lion, she wouldn't have needed to call. Red would have noticed her the second she entered the room, and would have either lowered her head at once, or watched her until she explained what she'd come for.

Then again, if Red was still the Red Lion, Nyma wouldn't be here at all.

"Hey, Red!" Nyma put her hands on her hips, staring up at the stubbornly-still lion. "Can I come in?" She paused, but there was still no answer. "So is that a _no_ , or are you just sleeping? Cause you know, it's really hard to tell." Silence. "Do I need to climb up there to make sure you're not dead?"

Another long pause followed, and Nyma was just about to start climbing Red's hull toward one of the auxiliary hatches when the lion finally moved, almost grudgingly.

It was bizarre to watch. These days, the Red Lion gave off the impression of being lifeless and hollow. Nyma couldn't have said why; the lions all sat unnaturally still when they were resting, as inert as any other piece of machinery. And Red's eyes still glowed Quintessence gold. It just _felt_ more empty. Maybe it was something about Red's Quintessence. Nyma wasn't sensitive to that sort of thing the way Val or Meri or the other Alteans were; she couldn't identify Quintessence signatures or trace the currents in the air.

That didn't mean Quintessence didn't affect her in more subtle ways. Maybe she could tell that the Red Lion's Quintessence had changed, that _Red_ was no longer part of the machine. It felt impersonal because it was, powered only by a Balmera crystal, like the castle-ship itself. Even its movements felt rehearsed, though they were as fluid as always.

The lion's chin hit the hangar floor with a _clang_ , and the ramp extended as the lion opened its jaw. Nyma started forward, only to stop at the sight of Red themself standing at the top of the ramp, arms crossed, glowering down at Nyma.

"No."

Nyma resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Okay, now you're just being contrary."

"Maybe I'm just tired of people trying to fix me. You ever think of that?"

"But I'm not _trying_ to do anything," Nyma said. "I just figured you might be lonely." She pulled out a data stick she'd shoved in her pocket before coming down here. "I brought movies."

Red's brow furrowed, their eyes darting this way and that as they studied her, waiting for the trap. When it didn't come, they shifted, angling one shoulder back into the interior of the lion in what Nyma took as silent invitation. Smiling, she headed up the ramp and busied herself with getting the movie set up. She'd done this in Blue with the others a few times before; the whole viewscreen could serve as a screen for watching movies without too much finagling needed. It was, thankfully, the same here. She doubted she could have figured it out otherwise, what with Red standing just behind her, glaring a hole between her shoulder blades.

Nyma did her best to ignore that, and focused instead on the advice Rolo had given her.

 _How'd you do it?_ she'd asked him, holding him close so she didn't have to look him in the eye. _How'd you get me to open up?_

 _I didn't get you to do anything,_ he said. _I just gave you a place where you felt safe. You did the rest._

_But what does that mean? How do I make them feel safe?_

Rolo had pulled back, then, studying her. She knew he was wondering who it was Nyma was trying to help, but there wasn't time to get into it all.

 _They remind me of me,_ was all she'd said. _I don't like seeing them hurt._

Nyma remembered shutting down any attempt by Rolo or the rest of their ever-shifting crew to delve into her past, but she only remembered thinking that it was none of their business, which didn't help, because her issues had never become Rolo's business; she'd just stopped getting irritated when he saw the things she tried to hide. That told her nothing about how to reach that same point with Red.

Rolo's advice had been simple: Just be there.

_People like you, they've been burned before. They couldn't count on the people who were supposed to have their backs, they trusted someone who didn't deserve it. Maybe they realized it before it ruined their lives, or maybe they've had to pick up the pieces after losing everything. Either way, you reach a point where you decide you're not going to put yourself in that position again. And the more someone wants something from you, the more you know to keep them away. Doesn't matter what they want, either. If they want to use you, or if they want to fix you. Either way, they only care until the job is done._

_That's why you can't want anything from this person. You can't be in it to satisfy your curiosity, or to fix something you think is broken, or anything else. If you really want to get through their shell, you have to be okay with that not happening--you have to be; you can't just fake it. Because if you caring about this person is dependent on them doing what you want, then you're exactly the sort of person they're trying to shut out._

Nyma had been thinking about Rolo's words all day. What did she want from Red? What did she want _for_ them? And was she okay giving even if she never got anything in return?

She wasn't sure of her answer, on any front, but she knew that she'd been alone and hurting for long enough to know no one else deserved that.

So here she was. Ready to offer companionship and distraction without asking anything in return. She got the memory stick inserted into Red's console, and a window popped up showing the files it contained.

"Got a preference?" she asked Red, who was curled up on Keith's chair, facing the forward viewscreen, their arms crossed atop their knees. They shrugged, and Nyma selected an action flick she and Val had found in the castle's archives. The plot was flimsy at best, but it was flashy enough and witty enough to make up for that, and there were enough explosions to make Red happy.

As the movie started playing, Nyma settled in on the floor beside Red's chair. She hadn't thought about the fact that the reds did things stupidly--like, for instance, only having one chair facing the right way--but she dragged the blankets off the cot where Red seemed to have been sleeping and made a comfortable enough nest.

She caught Red watching her as she got settled and stared back at them, unblinking.

Red tipped their head to the side, frowning slightly, but eventually turned back toward the movie. Nyma smiled to her self and leaned back as the explosions lit up the cockpit.

* * *

Allura sighed in contentment as she drifted in the depths of Black's Heart. They were deeper than the shallow sea, deeper than the stars. She had no physical form here, nor was there any light. Only darkness, peace, and Shiro and Black's minds intertwined with hers as she released the worries waiting for her in the physical realm and, for just this one moment, let herself simply exist.

This had become part of her morning and evening routine--visiting Black with Shiro, entering the Heart, letting go. There was too much that needed their attention, between the politics and the war and the continual quest for a solution to the issues of Dark Voltron and the Vkullor. If she let herself, Allura could have easily been consumed by it all.

Shiro and Black wouldn't let her reach that point, and she was as steadfast in chasing Shiro's worries away. They began each day by breathing, taking a moment to center themselves before talking through their priorities for the day so they had a clear plan in place before they began their work.

And they ended each day much the same, talking through their fears and concerns before letting them all go. By the time they left here, they would be relaxed and clear-headed enough for a restful night's sleep before they woke tomorrow to do it all again.

Today, at least, had been one of the good days. A few ongoing issues with a handful of Coalition worlds, but that was becoming routine, and for once none of the dissident whispers were coming from key players in the Chettok plan. Meanwhile, the other paladins were all nearly back to full strength, and while there had been no breakthroughs on the Vkullor front, there had also been no new sightings. And Coran had finally found a human therapist and a confidante from New Altea to bring on board. They were scheduled to arrive by the end of the week, and Shiro had already made his first appointment--a big step, all the more so because he'd taken the initiative on it, setting up the appointment before Allura had even had to consider how hard she was going to push him about it.

Yes, it had been a good day, all around--mostly a good day. Shiro had worked himself up over a situation with Red. Matt had seen something in the Heart--or he thought he had. He was convinced Akira was still in there, and for a moment, Shiro had believed it, too. Just for a moment, before the reality of the situation caught up with him.

 _I can’t hope,_ he’d said, his voice shaking. _I can’t let myself hope._ _Akira was--he was_ everything _to me, and now he’s gone, and I’ve been holding it together so far because I know that’s what he would have wanted. Win the war. Make his sacrifice count. But now there’s this, and it’s just… I want him back._

Allura had no advice to offer him, but she had sympathy in droves. She felt the emotion pouring off of him--the fear and pain and the hope that hurt most of all. He was angry at Matt for saying anything, and angry at himself for being angry.

They'd found no solution for that hurt, but Shiro had let it out, and Allura and Black had taken it on, quieting Shiro’s soul until he was able to relax into this deep meditation. They were all three of them at peace--as much at peace as they could be these days--so why was Allura's mind still so restless? Usually it was easy to let go of her thoughts once she descended into this deeper layer of Black's Heart. It was only on the worst days that she struggled--days like Klenahn, when the blood on her armor had chased her into the Heart, appearing on her hands like a stain.

Shiro's mind stirred in response to Allura's thoughts, and she exuded an apology as she strained to bring her mind back in line. Shiro didn’t need her anxious energy winding him up again, least of all when she had no idea where it was coming from. It was like she was forgetting about something, burying it deep so she didn’t have to deal with it. But she wasn’t dealing with anything that bad right now… was she?

_**It is not you.** _

Allura opened her eyes just as the stars began to appear overhead, winking into existence one by one, like luminous insects lighting up the night. For several seconds more, she continued to drift, shapeless and weightless in the darkness. Then a wave caressed her ankle, and her perspective suddenly shifted, the world wrenching around her so violently she stumbled.

Beside her, Shiro looked similarly disoriented, and she reached out to grasp his arm, offering them both a little bit of stability. Black stepped out of the stars, a shadow taking form. She was the kotha tonight, lithe and dark and as tall as Allura herself, the stars bleeding into the pattern of her coat and the golden moonlight pooling in her eyes.

"You know what this is?" Allura asked. She splayed a hand on her chest, surprised to find her heart racing. "I feel as though I'm about to go into battle."

Shiro regarded Black with kind eyes. "Or like I have something to say, and am afraid to say it."

Black ducked her head, a rumble of laughter drifting outward on the breeze. _**You know me too well,**_  she said, padding closer so gracefully her feet hardly left ripples where they entered the water.

Shiro stepped forward to meet her, letting her butt her head against his chest while he wrapped his arms around her neck. "That's what we've been working towards," he said. "You know you can tell us anything."

 _ **I do,**_  Black said, purring as Allura stepped up beside Shiro, weaving her fingers into the thicker, longer fur that ran down the back of Black's neck. _**I only worry how you will feel when you hear it.**_

"Whatever it is, I'm sure we can work through it together," Allura said. "We all made that promise, didn't we?"

Black nodded. _**This is something different, however. Not a burden of my own, but a decision that affects us all--one I cannot make alone.**_

"Tell us," Shiro said, pulling back just far enough to look her in the eye. "And then we'll go from there."

* * *

"You sure Nyma didn't want to come?" Lance asked, holding up two bottles of nail polish and debating between the metallic gold and the blue (a bit predictable, maybe, but it was a _good_  blue, with just enough sparkle in it to catch the eye.)

Val, already at work on Meri's base coat, only shrugged. "I'm pretty sure she's with Red, actually."

Lance looked up at her. "Red? You're joking."

"No. She hasn't said much, but I think she feels sorry for them."

The way things had fallen apart between Red and their paladins, Lance couldn't blame her. The whole situation was fucked up--all the more so because, although it was no one's fault but Keturah's, Lance could absolutely sympathize with Matt's determination to blame Red. They hadn't exactly done a good job of smoothing things over when everything went down. (But was that really their responsibility? They'd just almost died, _twice_. Lance could forgive a little snippiness in the aftermath.)

And the sad reality was Matt, Keith, and Shiro had plenty of support. Red had... the other lions, Lance supposed? He'd heard they'd gone down to visit Black a few times--but he also got the impression that Red's bond with their sisters wasn't what it had been.

"Good for her," Meri said, staring at her hands as Val finished up the base coat on the last nail. They'd taken over the rec room tonight for a little pampering--and maybe a little bit of distraction for Meri, who still had two days to wait until her next checkup with the medical staff, at which point she would hopefully be cleared to go back into the field. With the Kahales all gone with Shay to the Balmera, they'd had to prepare their own snacks for tonight, which consisted mostly of fruit and some of the precious few remaining chips they'd brought with them when they left Earth last year. Even the unopened bags had started to go stale, but so far Lance had had no luck convincing Shiro and Allura to order in more junk food via wormhole.

He didn't get what the big deal was. Send a couple Guard pilots down with a credit card and a cargo ship and tell them to go wild. Easy-peasy.

Shiro disagreed, and there had honestly been too much happening for the last few weeks to really pester him about it, so Lance was a little salty. But he'd savor his chips while they lasted.

"I'm not saying Red couldn't have handled things better," Meri said, as though Lance or Val had challenged her previous statement. "I'm just saying they've been through a lot. It's good they have someone."

"Hey, you don't have to convince me," Lance said, finally settling on the gold. "I get it. Everyone needs someone to lean on. I'm a little surprised Nyma volunteered, but I'm not angry or whatever."

"I don't think anyone's going to be mad about it," Val said. "Except Matt. Maybe Keith and Shiro."

Lance wrinkled his nose and took the base coat from Val to get started on her nails. "Shiro wouldn't be angry, even. Disappointed, maybe, but not angry."

Val leaned back on one hand as she surrendered the other to Lance. "The real question is whether Red's going to let Nyma help. They've been pretty... prickly since Oriande."

"Prickly." Meri snorted, then blew on her nails. "That's one word for it."

"Yeah, but Nyma's even more stubborn than the rest of us, when she wants to be," Lance said. "If she's as set on this as she seems to be, she might just out-stubborn Red."

Meri tipped her head at that. "We'll see how long it takes Red to regret picking her."

Lance grinned. "I don't think they expected her to turn against them."

"I wonder how much any of the lions realized what it was they were doing." Val was staring at the ceiling, her gaze distant. "I don't think Green expected Ryner to die. She knew I _could_  fly her, but she never expected me to have to. We were both figuring things out as we went along."

"You're doing okay now, though?" Lance asked. She seemed it--Pidge, too--but Lance hadn't actually checked in with them for... a while, really. He'd been too busy trying to keep Shiro and Allura from buckling under the pressure, and most of the rest of his energy went to Keith or to Meri, both of whom were doing well on the whole but still had days where it all caught up with them.

Val nodded. "You know the funny thing? Having Ryner's AI around has actually been helping. Like, a lot. With as hard as Pidge took it that first day, I wasn't sure, but now Pidge is down in the greenhouses every couple of days, and Ryner comes down to Green's hangar sometimes."

"Shiro and Allura are hanging in there, too," Lance said. "Stressed, of course. They're barely holding the Coalition together with this whole Vkullor mess scaring everyone off. Losing Akira isn't helping."

"I'm sure it's not," Meri muttered. Lance finished with Val's base coat and passed the bottle over to Meri, offering her his hands. She heaved a sigh as she began. "We need to do something about that Vkullor."

"Like what?" Val blew on her fingers as she contemplated the bottles of nail polish before her. "The closest we've got to killing it so far is almost killing _ourselves_."

"We should be tracking it." Lance looked up as the other two stared at him in silence. "What? Don't tell me you haven't thought about it before." He scowled, waving his free hand for emphasis. "Aside from the fact that it's unkillable, what's the most terrifying part of the Vkullor? The fact that we never know where it's going to strike. But here's the thing--it's way too big to go through a wormhole, and considering how long it goes between attacks, I have to assume that means it's traveling across the universe under its own power, like a Balmera. Which _means_ , if we can get a tracker on it, we'll have at least a little bit of warning before it attacks. We'll at least _know_  when it's near an inhabited system or any of the captive Balmera we've identified."

Meri went on staring at him, brush hovering above his nail. "Vkullor can’t be tracked," she said. “That’s what makes them so terrifying.”

“Ah-ah-ah.” Lance waggled a finger at her. “Vkullor haven’t ever _been_ tracked. There’s a difference.”

“They kill any signal we could possibly use to track them. Radio waves, heat, Quintessence… How exactly do you plan to get around that?”

Lance shrugged. “Hey, _I’m_ not the resident tech genius--and we’ve got several. All I’m saying is we shouldn’t assume it’s impossible before we’ve even made the attempt.”

“You want to tell that to Pidge and Hunk?” Meri said. “Be my guest.” Lance started to stand, and she pulled him back down by the hand. “ _When_ we’re done.”

Lance laughed and relented. Truth was, he was sure Pidge, Hunk, and Coran would all be just as skeptical as Meri--and maybe they were right to be. Lance was sure plenty of other geniuses had taken a crack at the problem before. Maybe there really was no solution.

He just didn’t want to give up so easily, not when tracking the Vkullor would solve a good quarter of their problems all on its own.

Before they’d finished with the pampering for the night, the door slid open, Shiro knocking as he entered with Allura.

"Look who it is!" Val called. "I was just about to coming looking for you."

Shiro arched an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Don’t hate me, but I took Nyma to see Rolo and found out that they're using Zuza as their new Ulaz. Sam thinks Dark Voltron's going to be back up and running soon."

Shiro took a moment to absorb that, glancing at Allura and nodding. "Good to know. We'll bring it up with the whole team tomorrow. Make sure we're all ready."

"We may have to call Hunk and Shay back from Theros early," Allura added.

Shiro frowned, nodding to Val. "I don't suppose there's any use in reminding you that Nyma’s supposed to be taking it easy?"

Val lifted one shoulder. "Not really, no."

He nodded. "Then I'll ask you to check in on Sam or Rolo once a day, as long as you're up for it. I don't want to cut Hunk and Shay's recovery any shorter than we have to."

Val flashed him a thumbs up.

"Anyway," Lance said. "You came here for a reason, I assume."

Shiro shook himself, nodded, and looked at Val. "Yes, actually. Allura and I need your help."

* * *

Shay's people still had no name for the free Balmera whose Migration they had joined. Their song had no translation that could parse their essence into sounds, no concise meaning that could be approximated with words. Their people, Shay's parents explained, spoke of them as one would a grandmother--wise, kind, nurturing, respected, authoritative. A life-giver, and far more than that.

Shay's parents, then, called these Balmera _the Grandmothers_ , and it was only in their song that Shay could distinguish between them. (Distinguish between them, yes. She was a long way from keeping them straight in her mind, however.)

When they arrived on the Grandmother Hunk and Shay had visited before--so Shay surmised from the familiar quality of the song surrounding them--it was to a reverent hush. The resonant chamber was empty, as it apparently must be for travel, but so too were the tunnels beyond.

"I do not understand," Shay said, speaking in a whisper on instinct because of the immense pressure all around that was the Grandmother's song. "The people of this Balmera seemed more than merely reluctant to enter these tunnels. There was a ritual to prepare. We had to seek the Balmera's permission before we were permitted to even approach the entrance. How can they be at ease with us entering from Theros without having done any of that?"

"These are public tunnels," her mother explained. "The only such anywhere on the Grandmother. The resonant chamber, and its connection to the rest of the Migration, is her gift to her people--a gift that comes with special permission to pass through freely. We must show respect, of course, but we need not humble ourselves as we would were we intruding deeper into the Grandmother's body."

Shay shook her head, too overawed by the simple existence of these chambers to grapple with the rest of it.

She was more overawed still when they emerged onto the surface and her parents greeted the pair of guards there with a lift in the song Shay had never heard before.

"You have learned the song?" she asked, breathless, as they moved on, passing from the crystal-lined plaza surrounding the resonant chamber entrance into the city proper. The streets buzzed with activity, the song rising and falling around her in a torrent that pressed on her chest in a way that was not entirely pleasant.

Shay's father hummed to soothe her, touching his hand to her back. "We have begun to. It is a difficult thing to learn, though we have known the song all our lives. I feel like a youngling again, still finding my voice."

That was the truth. Shay could not set foot on the free Balmera without feeling so. "But you spoke to those guards. How?"

"Practice," her mother said. "Some of our family have moved here, and some from the Grandmothers have come to us. Communication is difficult from both sides, but we have made strides. Larger strides for those who have immersed themselves in the song. A few of our own have become able to make themselves understood, and are able to interpret the song sufficiently enough to act as translators when we visit. For the rest of us..." She dipped her head. "We stumble along as best we can."

"Better than I am able," Shay said, quashing the resentment that had seeped into her song. It was not her parents' fault that she had been so long away from home. It was only to be expected that she would miss out on some things while she fulfilled her duty as paladin.

It still stung, seeing what she might have had.

Hunk took her hand and squeezed, and Shay settled her heart as they continued on through the city, past an open air marketplace and a crystal-accented garden and a quick, swift stream that flowed beneath the carved stone bridge they crossed.

They came, at length, to a squat, practical building Shay had never seen before. A number of other Balmerans were gathering here, singing anticipation as they filed in through the doors and joined the crowd already waiting within. Shay's parents led her and Hunk around the edges of the room until they were able to creep toward the front of the room and the Elders gathered there--Elders from this Balmera, from Metos, Theros, and Atsiphos, and others Shay did not recognize.

Their song quieted when they caught sight of Shay, then picked up again, brighter and cheerier than before.

A younger Balmeran stepped forward, dressed in the drab clothes of the more recently-freed Balmerans. "Elder Shay," she said, apparently translating for the local Elders. "Paladin Hunk. Welcome." She paused, fighting down a giddy grin. "You're just in time."

"In time for what?" Hunk asked, so breathless Shay knew he must have already guessed, as had she.

The translator's grin widened as the currents of the song stirred. "We mean to free our sister today. We were just about to begin."


	25. Victory and Loss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Hunk, Shay, and the Kahales went to visit Shay's parents while Hunk and Shay continued their recovery, but it won't be quite the restful retreat Shiro and Allura were hoping for. Shay's parents showed them the resonant chambers--special chambers within the Balmera that connect all members of the Migration, allowing for instantaneous travel among them. The Balmerans have recently freed several more Balmera from Zarkon's clutches and are about to begin another liberation.

The Migration had come a long way in the time Shay had been away. It left her overawed and struggling to focus on the battle plan being laid out for her twice over--once in words, and again in the song.

It was unclear whether one was translating for the other, or whether both were only relaying the same information they had previously decided on, but the song echoed what her ears heard, resonating even though she could not understand the strains to any great degree. It made them all feel like one unit despite the language barrier that divided them.

"We'll take it just like last time," the speaker was saying. Shay vaguely recognized him, though she didn't know his name. He was from Atsiphos; he'd been one of the first to step forward to help Hunk and Shay drive the Empire out. It was no surprise to find him here, leading another group on the verge of liberating another Balmera. "Three teams. Eln and Rils will lead the singers to the Heart Chamber to strengthen the Balmera. Rea will lead healers and a small number of fighters to the prisons and barracks so that the Empire cannot take hostages to use against us. The fighters will secure the chambers against counter-attack while the healers see to anyone who needs medical attention.

"Mek and Vesh will lead the two strike teams. Their first goal is to disable as many Imperial vehicles and weapons as possible before they can be used against us. Once that is finished, the strike teams will proceed to ambush the guards. Separate, corner, and kill. We let none escape; it will take some days for our sister Balmera to put enough distance behind her that retribution from the Empire is unlikely to land."

A cold, practical view. It shocked Shay, and she instantly felt guilty for being shocked. After what the Empire had done to the Balmera, they needed to be practical. Still, it saddened her to see her own people hardened so.

"You are good to come," a voice said in Shay's ear. She jumped, and turned to find Bek beside her, grinning as he continued translating for the Elder standing at his shoulder. "The help is of need. You can come, but you will listen to the leaders. Yes?"

Shay nodded. "Of course," she said, doing her best to sing her acquiescence. She wanted to say more--to exclaim at Bek's skill with the spoken Balmeran language, when mere weeks ago he had never spoken at all. She wanted to ask how he had learned, and why, and to commend him. But now was not the time. "We are honored to help," she said, speaking a touch slower than she normally would and putting more emphasis on her song. Bek was, without a doubt, the better of them at speaking the others' tongue, but that was no reason not to try.

"Where do you need help?" Hunk asked. "I know Imperial tech, if you want to sabotage it."

After a brief discussion, Bek nodded. "Vesh needs more people," he said. "And you are a Healer, Elder Shay, yes?"

She nodded. "I am."

"I will take you to Rea. Our healers are few, and this Grandmother hurts much. Her people are..." He hesitated searching for the words, but his song conveyed enough. There was a reason for the buzz of anticipation in the air. The people of this Balmera were suffering, and everyone here was anxious to put a stop it it.

Hunk turned to his family, but it was obvious to all that they were not going into battle. They had no training for it, and neither could they go with the Heart team to strengthen the Balmera.

"They will need help here," Shay's father said to the Kahales. "As we bring our wounded home and return for supplies. It is not nothing for you to remain here to help."

Shay could tell that Lana was uncomfortable with the notion, but she was practical enough to know that it was the right choice. She wouldn't help Hunk by coming with him, and would in fact only worsen his odds by making him worry about them.

Shay's parents, it seemed, had already planned on partaking in this liberation, though she could at least take comfort in the fact that they were going to the Heart Chamber, where there was least likely to be fighting. They had learned from Grandmother Mir how to care for the Balmera, and they knew better than most of the free Balmerans what wounds this Balmera had likely suffered.

Once Hunk and Shay had their assignments, then, that was it. There was nothing left to do except go, and Shay's heartbeat quickened as she followed a procession of Balmerans two hundred strong back into the tunnel that led to the resonant chamber.

They were a Migration--one people, united behind a common cause. The Empire would curse the day it had made an enemy of Shay's people.

* * *

"Do you think something like that is even remotely possible?"

Val sat back, too floored to speak for a moment as Shiro regarded her with thinly veiled desperation. He'd held it together as he laid it all out for her, this little scheme he and Allura and Black had concocted together. Even now, he sat with his head high, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped so she couldn't see whether or not they were shaking. Beside him, Allura was the very picture of royal poise.

They couldn't do anything to hide the infectious energy rolling off them in waves.

Hope.

It was a dangerous thing, especially to pragmatists like these two, who tempered every dream with careful consideration, cynicism, and a realism that bordered on self-destruction. They were the sort to believe anything was possible, but not to trust it until it was within their reach.

They were hoping now, though. Hoping Val would have a way to turn this dream into reality.

"I don't know," she said, the words stinging as she forced them out. But she wouldn't lie to them. She wouldn't promise something she didn't know she could deliver. "It all sounds fine in theory, but... You know I've never managed to project with someone who isn't tied to Blue or Green, right? If I could have taken Matt or Mrs. H to Commander Holt, I would have--same for Shay and her brother. I still think it's possible, but I haven't figured out the trick yet."

"What if we were in a Voltron formation?" Allura asked. "Would that provide the bond you need to carry us with you?"

Val ran a hand through her hair. "Maybe? I mean, look, I've had the same thought. By my current understanding of astral projection, it _should_ work. But I can't promise anything. I've never had a chance to try it. Usually when we form Voltron, it means there's some big crisis to deal with in the moment."

"You're willing to try, though?" Shiro asked. "When we get a chance?"

"Of course I'm willing to _try_. Next time we form Voltron, I'll yeet all three of us wherever you want to go. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here. It might not be a yeet so much as a yawn. For every step I progress with my magic, I hit at least ten more dead ends."

That didn't seem to phase Shiro at all. He nodded, an ache in the motion that didn't sit well with Val. He needed this, more than he wanted to let on. And Val didn't want to let him down.

"We'll find a way," she said, pouring every ounce of confidence she had into the words. "It might take a few tries, but I won't give up. I managed it with Pidge and Nyma; I'm sure there's a way to do it with you, too."

Shiro closed his eyes, nodding once. "Thank you," he said. "If there's anything we can do to help, just let us know."

She flicked two fingers in his direction. "You got it, boss. Got anything else on the agenda for today? Otherwise I'm gonna go dig back into the theory and try to figure out the best way to come at this."

"Nothing yet," Shiro said. "There's a major Coalition summit upcoming, and we're hoping to have something more concrete for them than theories and ideas when we go. So unless an emergency crops up, we want everyone putting at least part of their days toward the Vkullor issue."

"No problem." Val flashed a smile to cover her grimace. Two unsolvable problems; perfect. When she was tired of beating her head against one wall, she could turn around and beat it against a different one.

But she knew how important both lines of research were--and even if this wasn't the sort of research she enjoyed, she _was_ getting pretty good at piecing things together from obscure references. It was like investigative journalism... except she couldn't ask new questions of her sources, and she didn't get to write a dramatic and compelling story about it when she was done.

That was okay. Bigger concerns and all that. She stood, throwing her arms around Shiro's neck before he could slip away.

"I'll figure it out," she promised. "And you'll know the second I do."

Shiro relaxed under her hands, returning the embrace with a sigh. "Thank you," he said.

Apparently Val could still lie through her teeth, and have people believe her to boot. She smiled as Shiro turned away, then flicked a wave and hurried out of the conference room, her heart beating in her throat.

Because she had _no idea_ how she was going to pull this off.

* * *

The Balmera song was a drum beat pounding in Hunk's chest. It had been weak when he'd come through with Vesh's team, hardly a whisper on the edge of his hearing. His heart ached to hear it, to feel the weakness and fatigue of a Balmera under Imperial control. Had Theros ever been so weak? He didn't think so, but she'd been so much stronger by the time he'd learned to hear her song. Maybe he'd just never realized.

It quickly became apparent that this Balmera wasn't as weak as she seemed, however. Vesh called out into the song, several other voices with her--the leaders of the other teams, Hunk assumed, each sounding off as they came through the resonant chamber. The song stirred in response, answering with defiance and expectation.

"You've been here before, haven't you?" Hunk asked the other members of his team as they crouched in the shadows of a quiet tunnel. There appeared to be no one around: no strains in the song besides their own, no movement or voices to indicate Imperial patrols. As best Hunk could tell, Vesh was building a mental map, plotting out their route together with Mek.

The perks of having an innate, Balmera-wide communication system the Empire couldn't hack. Hunk had to grin at the thought. Zarkon really had no idea who he was dealing with. If he had, there would be a hell of a lot more security stationed on every Balmera.

"Not all of us," one of the Balmerans nearest Hunk replied in a whisper. "A small team. They came a week ago to establish the bridge and to prepare those here for what was to come. They have returned perhaps twice. Enough to prepare, but not so much as to risk discovery."

Hunk nodded, quietly marveling at the planning. This was the fourth liberation in--what? Hardly a month? Unless they had begun it even before that. They were quick, and confident, and they wasted no time in seizing what they wanted. In rallying the people here for a revolution. He could feel it building in the song. Anticipation. Anger, sharpened into a weapon ready to turn against the Empire. They must have been told to wait for a signal, because Hunk could feel the restraint in the song. They were eager to fight back.

But Hunk and his team had a job to do first.

Vesh waved them onward, and Hunk fell in line with the others, fifteen Balmerans plus himself, dressed in dark clothes and carrying toolkits and weapons. Hunk wouldn't have minded a handful of explosives, as well, but the Balmerans didn't seem to have any--and he could appreciate the desire to be quiet about this, if nothing else. Their goal was to disable anything the guards could use in the coming battle that would give them an advantage, and to do so without tipping anyone off.

They headed first for the surface, where the main base was flanked by a small airfield and an armory. Mek's team stayed below--heading for weapons caches or guard checkpoints or something of the like, Hunk couldn't be sure. He was surprised they were so close, but as he searched through the song, he realized something he'd overlooked before: all the Balmerans here were concentrated in this area. They must have lived all throughout the Balmera at one point, as on the other Balmera, but something had compelled the Empire to concentrate their efforts to a single mine. Maybe they'd killed too many Balmerans to keep more mines open. Maybe they'd picked all the other mines clean.

Or maybe they didn't have the manpower to patrol a larger area than this. Certainly they didn't have the equipment for it; Hunk counted half a dozen fighters on the airfield, plus a single freighter and a hangar that might have held two or three more ships. The camp as a whole might have supported thirty or forty Galra, plus however many sentries they had stationed here.

Those would be the real threat, the sentries. Hunk wondered where their control beacon was, and whether the Balmerans had accounted for it.

When he asked, all he got was a laugh. "Let Mek worry about that. We are here for the ships. Let none escape, and give them no chance to hit us from above."

It was a level of vindictiveness Hunk had caught hints of during the briefing, but it still unnerved him. Even just a few months ago, most Balmerans he met were pacifists. For Shay to leave and join the war was entirely unheard of, and even those who supported her decision seemed off-put by it. Others, like Rax, had outright denounced it.

He supposed the Vkullor had changed things. There was no running, there was no hiding, and there was no fighting back. You just had to hope you survived to pick up the pieces afterward. It left Hunk feeling helpless, and he wasn't the one the Vkullor was targeting. What must it have done to the Balmerans who had felt its wrath first hand? He couldn't blame them for needing to take action against the Empire, and he couldn't blame them for showing no mercy. What mercy had the Empire ever shown them?

It saddened him, of course. He'd tried to spare lives where he could, knowing that, even within the Empire, there were people who could change, if they were given the chance. But sometimes you couldn't do that. Sometimes the only way to save the victims was the utter destruction of the ones threatening them. Hunk had seen it before. He'd carried out that sentence.

And he would do it again here, if that's what he had to do. The guards couldn't be allowed to escape, or future liberations were doomed to fail. They could try to hold them prisoner, but that was risky, and this Balmera certainly didn't have the resources for it. And, of course, Hunk had known very few Imperial soldiers to surrender. _Victory or death_ and all that. Very possibly it wouldn't be a choice at all; they would fight until it was clear they had lost, and then they would go on fighting.

But first, the sabotage. Vesh sent them out in pairs, one to keep watch while the other cut wires, drained fuel cells, and busted controls--anything that would render the equipment useless without drawing immediate attention. Beyond that, they were left to their own devices.

Four pairs headed for the airfield and hangar, the other four to the armory. Hunk went with this team; it was easier to sabotage most ships than most weapons, as long as you knew where to target, as these Balmerans clearly did. Weapons were a little more finicky--but Hunk had analyzed Imperial weaponry at least as much as he'd analyzed their ships. The paladin armor automatically analyzed every weapon it came in contact with and uploaded the data to the castle to help in designing more effective defenses. Hunk and Matt had poked around in the data on a couple of lazy afternoons, more out of curiosity than anything, but that, together with first-hand experience, gave Hunk a particular knack for disabling Imperial firearms. Remove a cartridge here, snip a line of conduit here, score the barrel of this model--it was unstable already, and any amount of damage made it prone to tear itself apart.

They were halfway through a meticulous sweep of the armory when the door hissed open. Hunk spun, dropping the pistol and cutters he'd been holding as his bayard fell into his hand.

The lookouts were faster.

Two Imperial guards had entered the armory together, their chatter trailing off as they took in the scene before them. By the time Hunk turned, one had gone for his gun.

In the next heartbeat, both were on the ground, one with a knife in his neck, the other's helmet caved in from the force of the second Balmeran's blow. The other two lookouts were already at the door, darting outside long enough to ensure no other company was on its way.

Hunk stared at the bodies, his stomach turning over as the one with the slashed neck opened his mouth, eyes wide and frantic until the light left them.

A year and a half out here fighting this war, and Hunk still wasn't used to watching the enemy die. He turned back to his work a moment after the others did the same, but his eyes kept going back to the Balmerans who had done the killing. He didn't recognize either of them, but given the way their song deepened as they moved together to hide the bodies in a dark corner of the armory, he surmised they were from the original Migration--free Balmerans who had never lived under Imperial rule. Trained soldiers, maybe; Bek had mentioned a defense force of some sort, though Hunk had never been totally clear on whether it was a police force meant to keep order within the Balmeran society or an army ready for an attack from the outside.

Either way, they had adapted quickly to fights like this one. They didn't hesitate, didn't second-guess themself. Hunk would be glad to have them at his back in any fight.

They were also proof that he had to stop thinking of Balmerans as pacifists. That wasn't a universal truth anymore, if it had ever been.

That was probably a good thing. At the very least, it would make today easier on them all--easier on Hunk and Shay, who were, after all, supposed to be resting.

If the entire day went like this, then Shiro and Allura would have nothing to complain about.

* * *

Shay listened to the melody of the Balmera as she moved through dim tunnels with the rest of her team. Only the glow of tiny crystals lit the way here; great holes had been carved into the walls--the scars where larger crystals had been extracted, she assumed. It seemed anything larger than her little finger had already been harvested. Likely, it was the same everywhere. This Balmera was weak, though she was not beyond saving yet.

Shay knew the moment the other team, the one her parents had joined, reached the heart chamber. The Balmera's song swelled, bolstered by a strength that spread rapidly through the hundreds of voices partaking in the song.

It was fortunate they had come when they had, for Shay didn't know how much longer these people could have held on. As it was, Shay was nearly overcome by emotion when she saw the first of the prisoners crowded into a long line of cells.

As with the prisons once built into the tunnels of her own home, these were crude cells--small, rough-cut hollows in the tunnel walls blocked off by heavy steel bars and an electronic lock. Shay went with the other healers to the cells at once, reaching through the bars to the Balmerans within--some of them old and frail, some still younglings. Many bore signs of recent beatings, and wet coughs filled the darkness. The prisoners were packed ten and twelve to a cell, far too many to be comfortable. They leaned against each other, sat against the wall or curled into balls on the floor to sleep, squeezing out space for themselves so they wouldn't be kicked or stepped on by the others moving about the cells in an effort to stay warm, to keep up their strength.

Shay's fury flared, and she tested the strength of the bars. She knew she wouldn't be able to pull them from their mounts, and the Balmera was too weak to crush them with her walls, but all Shay could think of was how much she wanted them gone. She'd gone so far as to summon the bayard, ready to try to force it into a bladed form that could cut through the bars, when someone appeared with the key card and the still-sparking hand of a sentry.

Shay glanced behind her. There must have been a guard patrol nearby, or a security booth of some sort. How had she not seen it?

It didn't matter; the soldiers who had accompanied this team had already neutralized the threat and moved quickly down the line of cells, throwing the doors wide. Prisoners spilled out, sobbing in gratitude, clinging to their rescuers, standing tall and angry and ready to fight back. A few fled toward the darkness of the tunnels, but the liberation force corralled them, singing reassurances. They couldn't risk alerting the guards until everyone was in place.

Shay spared all of this activity only half a mind. While most of the prisoners had emerged from the cells as soon as they were able, a few remained within--scared, sick, injured, or all three. Shay ducked into the first cell as other healers did the same all down the line. She crouched beside a elderly woman tucked into the back corner, her knees pulled up to her chest. The woman seemed unaware of the cell around her, staring blankly at the far wall and shivering. She jumped when Shay laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Are you well?" Shay asked, ducking her head. "I am here to help."

The woman did not answer aloud, though her song changed, fear and hope rising together. There was pain intertwined with it all, and Shay cautiously began to pour her Quintessence into the woman, seeking out wounds and places where the pain was stronger to focus her healing. The woman's song turned frantic for a moment as she tried to pull away, but she quieted soon after, wonder overtaking all else. She stared at Shay's hands, and slowly, slowly the tension left her body.

A hand touched Shay's shoulder, and she turned, surprised to find the rest of her team gathering with the prisoners, carrying those unable to walk under their own power.

"We are heading out," the woman said softly. "We will regroup with the rest of the locals and find somewhere we can defend. It is almost time."

Almost time.

Shay's pulse quickened, and her mind went at once to Hunk, who was somewhere far above her. Between the song and the paladin bond, she picked him out at once--his adrenaline, his uncertainty, his confidence. It was the same complicated mix of emotions she sensed from him in most battles. He knew what he was doing, and that he would do it well, but that never was enough to stop the voice that asked whether he _should._

In answer to her unasked question, he sang affirmation: they were nearly done disabling what weapons and tools they needed to disable. Soon, it would come to violence.

Shay nodded to the woman who had come to get her, a warrior, it seemed. She spoke Shay's language too well to have come from the free Balmera, but the armor she wore was too finely crafted to have come from anywhere else. Perhaps she had been training with the people of the original Migration, learning to defend herself and her people from those who would enslave them.

Shay picked up the woman to whom she had been tending and rejoined the rest of the group, which set off together into the darkness. The warriors led the pack and followed behind, ready in case any guards happened upon them. From her place in the center of the procession, Shay could make out little of what was happening in either direction, but from time to time shouts and cries of pain reached her ears, the song turning frantic for a moment.

The bodies were removed before they moved on, but the blood remained, slick and warm underfoot. Shay tightened her jaw and looked down at the woman in her arms. It wasn't so very long ago that it was Shay's home, her _family_ , hurting like this. The same was happening on countless Balmera all across the universe right now.

She wished the warriors all the strength and speed in the universe, and set her jaw as she stepped over another smear of fresh blood.

* * *

Luz grunted as the gladiator's staff smacked her training sword out of her hand. She felt the sting of it all along her palm, a throbbing sensation like a stubbed toe that made her tense up for a second--only a second, though, because the gladiator bot wasn't stopping just because she was unarmed.

She leaped back as it swung at her, the tip of its staff barely missing her arms, which she'd raised to protect her face. Edi hadn't needed to drill _that_ into her; she'd played dodgeball enough to know how much getting hit in the face hurt.

The gladiator was slow to correct itself; it was only set to the first level, after all, so it was meant to give her time to find her balance again. Still seemed too fast, but Luz had watched Edi spar against a level three, so she knew how much quicker it was. She took the opportunity to look for her sword, which had of course skittered away to the opposite side of where the gladiator now stood.

She backed away, keeping her eyes on the gladiator the way Edi had taught her but tracking the position of her sword out of the corner of her eye. Edi had talked her through the gladiator matches long before she'd let Luz try one, so she had some idea what to expect. What it looked like when the bot was about to attack, how fast it could move and what it would expect her to do. She was unarmed, so it would go for her legs; once she was down, it would declare the match a loss and deactivate. As long as she didn't let it trip her up, she was relatively safe until she got her sword back.

It knew she would be going for the sword, of course, so there was no point trying to surprise it--she _had_ , in fact, tried that the first time it disarmed her, and had wound up with a bloody nose when it swept her ankles and she face-planted into the mat.

(Edi had freaked out and ended training early that day, and that more than the pain had taught Luz to be more careful in the future.)

No, surprise was out, at least in this. But a level one was dumb enough--or nice enough--to let her turn it around, if she did it right. Which she did. Edi talked a lot about maneuvering your opponent where you wanted them to go in order to corner them, or gain the high ground, or use terrain to your advantage (not that she was anywhere near letting Luz fight in the bigger training rooms where you could customize the battlefield to be something other than flat, open ground.)

Luz began to circle, keeping her distance from the gladiator and watching for signs that it was about to strike. When it drew its staff back, she jumped, clearing the staff like this was the nastiest game of jump rope ever. It didn't attack often, something else that scaled as the gladiators got to higher levels. This one only attacked once every second or two; it blocked but didn't counterattack; it knocked you down but didn't go for the kill. The level threes Edi fought would string together a couple of attacks before pausing, and sometimes instead of blocking, they would dodge and try to hit her in the opening that created.

It still didn't attack her when she was down, though. That was apparently the next level, and Edi was off right now with Allura trying to get the go-ahead to fight level fours on her own.

 _Technically_ , Luz didn't have the go-ahead to fight level ones on her own, but she had too much energy to sit around waiting for Edi to finish.

It would be fine. A level one didn't hit hard enough to do any real damage.

(Not since Shiro had bullied the Alteans into adjusting the levels to account for the _other_ species on the castle-ship.)

The next time the gladiator reared back to strike, Luz made a break for it, reaching down for her sword and turning her momentum into a somersault that carried her well out of reach of the gladiator's attack. She got her feet under her and grinned, giddy at having actually pulled that off. Usually she missed the sword, or went crooked when she tried to stand up, and Edi kept telling her not to get so fancy.

But when it worked, it _worked_ , and she wound up a quarter of a circle around behind the gladiator, out of its line of sight and _well_ out of line with any attack it might try. With a whoop, she leaped in, bringing her sword down in an overhead swing that...

Well, it didn't cleave the gladiator's helmet in two, which was what she liked to imagine it would have looked like in a real battle with a real sword. Instead, it just sort of ricocheted off--hitting the top of the helmet, just off center, then scraping the side and bouncing out to hit the shoulder instead.

The gladiator still recognized it as a blow to the head, and the light in its eyes went out as it dropped to its knees, whirring in defeat.

Luz stepped back and let the room reclaim it, breathing hard and grinning from ear to ear.

"Not bad."

Luz eeped and spun around, leveling her training sword at Keith, who was leaning against the wall just inside the door. As soon as she realized who it was, her mouth dropped open. She tucked her sword behind her back--like that would help anything--and flashed a smile while she searched for some excuse for why she might be here, training against a gladiator she _definitely_ wasn't cleared to fight without supervision--or at all.

"So... how long have you been standing there?" she asked.

The corner of Keith's mouth twitched. "A few minutes. Long enough to see that you've been training. You teach yourself?"

"Um. Yes." Luz lifted herself up on her toes and smiled again. Keith quirked an eyebrow, but if he thought she was going to get Edi in trouble because _Luz_ had decided to break the rules, then he didn't know her at all.

Keith nodded. "Cool. Nice job taking out that gladiator."

She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to figure out where the trap was. "Thanks... It's only on level one."

"Still." Keith tapped his claws against the wall, one after the other in quick succession so it came in a quick, repetitive rhythm. "How long have you been training?"

Luz shrugged and picked at a seam in her practice sword. She wasn't sure what it was made of--some kind of super strong plastic, maybe--but there was a seam along the edge and a place all the way at the bottom of the hilt where the plastic made a tiny little spike. She picked at this rather than answer Keith's question and hoped he'd go away.

Instead he stepped forward, crossing his arms over his chest. Luz cringed away from him, waiting for the lecture.

"You want some pointers?"

She lifted her head, blinking at him twice before she convinced herself she hadn't heard wrong. "Pointers?"

"Sure. I use a sword, too, so I thought... maybe I could help you out?"

"You're serious?"

He cocked his head to the side, frowning like he didn't know why she had to ask. "Sure. Not that you aren't doing well on your own, but it goes faster if you have someone to teach your, or even just to spar. Someone who's not a gladiator, I mean."

Well, Luz _had_ that in Edi--but then again, Edi used a staff, not a sword. She'd tried teaching Luz to use a staff, too, but Luz didn't like it. There was the obvious reason (it was useless for stabbing and slashing), but it was also just _long_ and _awkward_ , and she hit the floor and the walls more often than she hit her target, when she didn't jab herself in the gut with the butt of the staff mid-swing.

Maybe training with someone who actually knew about swords would be helpful.

She studied him a few minutes longer, still waiting for him to turn on her, to start lecturing her about safety and responsibility and whatever, or else to drag her off to her parents or Princess Allura and let _them_ do the lecturing. He didn't seem inclined to do either, though, and the longer it went on, the less Luz suspected him of waiting for the right moment to strike.

She almost wanted to ask him straight-out, but if he hadn't thought of it, she didn't want to be the one to put it in his head.

So she shrugged, waved her sword at the empty room, and said, "Okay. Sure."

He smiled, tapping the hidden button on the wall that opened a compartment where the training weapons were stored. There weren't as many here as in the bigger rooms, from what Luz had heard--just a few blunt not-plastic practice swords and a few staves--but it was good enough for where Luz was right now, and Keith didn't seem to mind, either. He grabbed one of the swords, closed the compartment, and joined Luz in the middle of the room.

"There are lots of different ways to use a sword," he said, swinging his sword a few times and then adjusting his grip. "When I lived in the Empire, the officers made a big deal of it. What style you use, who you trained under, whether you've reached certain landmarks within that style's progressions."

"What style did you train in?" Luz asked.

Keith snorted. "Depends. The answer's either all of them, or none. My father tried to train me in his style, but I was no good at it. Didn't have the brute strength. So I ditched my lessons and went around to the various training decks to see how other people fought. I watched them all, fought against most of them, and cobbled together my own style."

Luz wrinkled her nose. "Then why bother telling me about the styles at all?"

"Because," he said, touching the tip of his sword to the ground and crossing his arms on the pommel. "You're going to have to figure out how _you_ fight. I can teach you how I do it, but that's just one way. Maybe it won't work for you. If it doesn't, that's okay."

"Okay..." Luz hefted her sword, holding it up the way Edi liked her to do to show she was ready for a sparring match. "Then let's just go. What do I need to do?"

Keith didn't immediately launch into an attack, unfortunately. Instead, he came to stand beside her, adjusting the angle of her arms and showing her a different way to hold the sword. (He _claimed_ it was different, at any rate; Luz wasn't so sure.) Then he had her watch him mime a few attacks against an imaginary opponent--done slowly so she could see what his hands and his feet were doing.

Her first attempt to mimic him were... clumsy, at best. But he didn't seem to mind, just helped her do it better the next time. It was the same sort of boring stuff Edi had her do, so she figured it was helping--but it sure didn't feel like it. Thankfully, Keith didn't make her swing at empty air for long. After about five minutes, he decided she had it down well enough to move on, and she got to attack him, instead.

Slowly.

"I don't get it," she said after about fifty repetitions of the same old, achingly slow attack-block-attack pattern. "Whenever _you're_ down here, you're like..." She flailed her hands, miming out the sort of fast-paced battle she may-or-may-not-have snuck down to spy on once or twice before. "How can you stand to move so slow?"

For some reason, he smiled at that. They were sitting on the ground, legs crossed and swords resting across their knees, each of them sipping at a water pouch. "It's hard," he said. "I know it is. I just keep telling myself that it's good for me."

Luz tipped backward with a groan. "That's what _everyone_ says. It's _boring._ "

Keith laughed--not in a mean way, really, but that didn't stop Luz scowling at the ceiling. "You can't learn at top speed," he said. "Believe me, I've tried, and all I got for it was a bunch of bruises. Maybe I got a little better at dodging. You practice it slow so your body know what it's supposed to do. Once you've got it down, you can speed it up."

He gave a heavy sigh that made Luz pick her head up off the ground to look at him. He was staring at the wall, a pinch between his brow like he was thinking hard about something.

"I was an okay swordsman when I was with the Empire," he said. "I was small and quick, and I didn't fight the way the other Galra expected. That gave me an advantage. And I never gave up, which helped even more. But I've learned so much more in the last year, thanks to Shiro and Allura forcing me to slow down and go back to basics, than I learned in an entire _lifetime_ making it all up as I went along." He tilted his head to catch her eye and quirked a crooked smile. "I know it doesn't feel like it, but I promise I'm showing you a shortcut. Take a few weeks to do things slower than you want to, and then after that you'll be leaps and bounds ahead of where you would've been otherwise."

She squinted at him, but he didn't look like he was trying to trick her. That was the sort of thing Lance would've done--put her in the kiddy class where it was safer and tell her it was actually going to make her better faster.

She didn't think Keith was doing that. He wasn't the type to trick people into doing things.

So she nodded, lifting her water pouch and squirting the last little bit into her mouth. Crumpling the empty pouch, she sat up. "Okay," she said. "I'll believe you. For now."

He chuckled and climbed to his feet, finishing the last of his water on the way to the trash chute in the wall. Luz chucked her pouch in after his, and they headed back out into the center of the room, Luz setting herself up to run the same pattern of attacks a hundred more times.

Before she could start, the door hissed open, and Edi walked in, her eyes sticking on something behind her in the hallway. "I hope you haven't been fighting the gladiator without me, Luz, you know you're not ready for--"

Edi stopped short as she turned and caught sight of Keith, who had one arm crossed over his chest, his training sword resting against his shoulder.

He glanced at Luz. "Figured it all out on your own, did you?"

Luz flushed, but she was more worried about Edi than Keith right now--especially since Edi looked like she was about to keel over on the spot. "What are you doing here? I thought you were training with Allura!"

"I was." Edi's head turned toward Luz, but her eyes might as well have been glued to Keith. "Shiro called, and then the princess said she had to go. It sounded urgent."

Keith frowned. "That's not good."

Edi curled her hands around her staff, clutching it to her chest. "Um... What are you doing here?"

"Hm?" Keith blinked. "Oh. I was just teaching Luz a little about the sword." He glanced at the door, his practice sword tapping against his shoulder. "I should go see what's happening with Shiro and Allura, actually. Why don't you two train together for a while?"

"Uh... sure?" Luz said. "You really think it's that bad?"

Keith, who had already gone to put his sword away, suddenly stiffened and turned around. "If it was an emergency, they already would have called me," he said. "I just want to see if it's anything I can help with. You two be careful, okay?"

"Okay..." Luz frowned after him as he ran out the door. Suddenly training seemed a lot less important, but what was she supposed to do? Follow him to the bridge and sneak into a private paladin meeting?

It was tempting, but if she got caught, she was going to have a lot harder time sneaking away to train with Edi.

She would just have to figure out away to get somebody to tell her what had happened later.

* * *

Hunk's team regrouped in the highest levels of the mine less than twenty minutes after they'd split up. Vesh took report: every ship was grounded, their comms worthless. The weapons in the armory were similarly trashed, leaving very little of value in the surface camp. There was always the chance the Empire had left behind something of value in the other mining camps they'd abandoned over the years, but without vehicles, none were close enough to make a difference.

Moments after that, a melody rose in the song--a promise of safety, a defensive countermelody running underneath. Hunk closed his eyes, and could just barely make out a shadow of Shay's surroundings. They must have finished extracting the prisoners, and they'd taken shelter in an old, deep cavern. It was dark and crowded, but it was safe.

They were ready to begin the offensive as soon as the two sabotage teams gave the all-clear. Vesh did so at once, her voice cleaving through the chaos of the song and leaving a breath of silence in its wake. Hope and anticipation swelled to fill the silence, and Hunk could feel the people of this Balmera readying themselves for the coming battle.

When, moments later, Mek signaled success on his front, as well, the song rose to a fever pitch. Vesh's voice rose along with it, and she raised her spear in the air as Eln, her second-in-command, as far as Hunk could tell, cried, "It is time! Let us reclaim our kin's home!"

Hunk found it hard to call out with the same enthusiasm as the rest of the warriors on this team, but he followed them down the tunnel without protest. He had fought and killed for fewer lives than were at stake here, and he wasn't about to turn away.

He supposed he was just a little more jaded than this army. A little more tired of it all. That was okay. Their fervor might make them sloppy, overeager and prone to putting themselves in harm's way. Hunk would take it on himself to watch their backs. Let the fresh and passionate fighters reclaim this Balmera.

He just wanted to bring them all home alive.

* * *

Shay was still healing prisoners when the call went out to begin the attack. She raised her head at once, adrenaline surging through her. She should be out there. As a paladin, she had more battlefield experience than anyone here, and a more powerful weapon. She should be on the front lines, fighting to take back another Balmera from the Empire. She _should_ have been here all along, to help reclaim the last three.

A glance at the youngling beneath her hands was enough to quiet the urge. The Empire's atrocities here were many, and several of those they'd recovered from the prisons were on the brink of death. The Migration had sent as many healers as were willing to walk onto the battlefield, but that did not mean all of them were skilled enough to treat an illness like this one.

Besides. More than half their forces had gone to sabotage the Empire's weaponry and machines. If they had signaled completion, it must have meant that they were confident they'd stripped the enemy of its advantages. They surely would have disabled the sentries, which would steeply reduce the enemy's forces. Very likely, they would be fine without Shay's aid, _an_ _d_ it would leave Hunk free to use the bayard as much as he needed.

This youngling needed Shay far more than the other warriors did.

She hummed to him as she worked, mindful of the youngling's parents, who were huddled nearby--careful to give Shay enough room to work, but otherwise straying no further than they must. Neither of them had been in the prisons with their child, and they had been distraught to find him in such a state.

Shay did not know what a youngling could possibly have done to earn such a punishment, especially one so young. He could not have been more than half Shay's age, small and thin, his carapace still soft. Perhaps the guards had taken people at random, or perhaps he had been caught up in the middle of a riot.

Perhaps they had taken him in order to deter his parents.

It mattered not at all; none of these people deserved such cruelty, and a youngling least of all. Shay bowed over him, shutting out the sounds of battle and the furor in the song as her people fought. She reached deeper, seeking the voice of the Balmera herself--strong and steady. The team in the heart chamber was doing its job; the Balmera's voice was already many times stronger than it had been when Shay first arrived, and she cloaked herself in it, reveling in the hope and strength the Balmera offered, the promise of rest when all was done.

Shay poured that promise into the youngling, drawing the illness out of him and bolstering his Quintessence with her own. She had done the same for several others already, any she came across who needed the aid, and she was dragging. This boy's illness was worse than the others she had treated already, and her hands shook by the time she dared stop.

She sat back on her heels, watching the youngling breathe for a moment--deeper and more easy than he had before. She nodded to his parents, who lifted him into their arms at once, the mother bowing her head to his, the father clasping hands and leaning against his mate.

"He will need rest," she told them, some corner of her mind still lucid enough to be surprised at the way fatigue made her words slur. She tried to smile, but her body was slow to respond. "Keep him warm. Get him food, when you're able. Broth, to start. He should be better in no time."

The father reached out for her, trying to thank her, but Shay excused herself. There were still more ill and injured to tend to, and far too few healers. If not for the fighting in the tunnels, she would suggest someone start to ferry the worst cases back to the Grandmother, where twice as many healers were waiting to care for those injured in the battle.

For now, it was too risky, so Shay forced herself to stand and went in search of her next patient, and then the next after that. It was dark in this chamber, only a handful of moss lamps in the corners of the space to chase away the gloom. It made it difficult to tell the time, and the restless, anxious press of bodies made it all the worse.

Still, Shay persevered. She had to. How many people had already died here? How many would die tonight because there weren't enough healers here to save them?

Shay would do everything in her power to make sure that number remained as low as possible.

* * *

In the end, the battle was over before Shay had run out of people to treat.

For a time, she did not notice. There was only the Balmera's voice, the patient beneath her hands, and the flow of Quintessence that grew ever more difficult to summon.

When the larger song quieted, then, Shay hardly noticed. All was already quiet inside her. It was the hush of fatigue, of desperation, of a stubborn refusal to stop.

Someone placed a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped, and only then did the quiet register. An awed silence had fallen over the Balmera, wonder and a cautious expectation cropping up like camp fires in the darkness. If Shay looked farther, she could pick out the strains of victory, of fatigue to match her own, and of fresh pain.

At once, she tried to stand, to go to the wounded and tend them. She had done enough here to get her most recent patient beyond immediate danger, and those who had fallen in battle might yet be saved, if she was quick enough.

The one who had touched her shoulder held her back. Rea, a fellow Elder and healer Shay knew well, one she had trained under, when her grandmother had other business to attend to. Shay knew she had been appointed to lead this team, but she had not seen her in the chaos.

" _Pax_ ," Rea said. "It is over. The tunnels are safe. We are bringing the rest of the wounded to the resonant chamber. We will take them home, and others will see to their care."

Shay nodded. "I will help--"

"You will _rest_ ," Rea said. She pushed her toward the wall and made her sit. "You have worked yourself half to death, _Elder_ Shay. You have pushed yourself further than any other. Now you will let others do some of the work."

There was a hint of reproach in her voice, and not half the respect due an Elder, even from another Elder, but Shay supposed Rea had known her since she was a youngling--had _wrangled_ her as a youngling, at that, when she was restless and disinterested in her lessons. If there were any who had a reason not to think of her as an Elder, Rea ranked high on that list.

Because of that, or perhaps because she was _so_ tired, having run out of the adrenaline that had been keeping her going, Shay yielded to Rea's urging and let herself rest.

Just for a time. Then she would return to aid with the clean-up.

* * *

Hunk left the other warriors to dispose of the bodies. He'd never had the stomach for it, and there were more important things to do. Mek and Vesh's teams had eliminated the sentries and the weapons and the vehicles--had made it a disturbingly easy thing to sweep in and eliminate the handful of dozen guards left to hold the mine.

The Balmerans hadn't lost a single soldier, though two from Hunk's group had been badly injured--badly enough that they were rushed back to the resonant chamber as soon as the fighting was over. Hunk hoped they would pull through, but it was a thin hope today.

This war bred so much hatred. He couldn't fault the Balmerans for it, not after everything they'd suffered, everything they'd lost to the Empire, but it saddened him. How many people, all across the universe, had been forced to become this--to fight and kill to protect what they loved? To become soldiers when they could have been so much more?

It was a sorrow without a focus. He wanted to be angry, but at who? If he got angry, wasn't he just the same as everyone he pitied?

Maybe he was. Maybe he had been for a long time now.

Maybe the only thing to do was to put an end to the war once and for all.

For now, though, there was work to be done. This Balmera would join the Migration, but it would take time to do so, and right now it was vulnerable. There were already teams spreading out across the entire Balmera, searching for any comms equipment, anything that was transmitting back to the Empire. They couldn't risk this Balmera being tracked and either killed before she reached the Migration or followed back to the other Balmera so Zarkon could slaughter them all in one fell swoop.

Hunk was tired and aching, though the battle hadn't lasted long. For the first time, he thought maybe Shiro and Allura had been right to tell him to rest. There wasn't any real pain, but his back felt like he'd been hauling boxes all day, and his legs were beyond ready for a rest.

Worse than that, he felt--angry. Frustrated. He felt _redundant_. He’d hardly done anything in the fight, couldn’t even say that he’d helped it along. He could have stayed back on the castle resting up and nothing would have changed.

It should have been reassuring, knowing that the Balmerans could handle themselves, but instead it stung. It felt like he was being left behind.

Hunk realized with a start that the frustration wasn’t his own. Rather, it was coming from Shay, wave after wave of sorrow, frustration, and guilt rising ever higher. Hunk’s heart clenched, and he shook himself, pushing through the ache and the fatigue as he went in search of Shay.

He found her deep in the tunnels, near where he’d sensed a concentration of voices. The large chamber had only one entrance and could have fit hundreds of Balmerans. It was the perfect place to hole up and hold out.

It was nearly empty now, though, only a couple dozen Balmerans still milling about. A larger number clogged the corridors leading to the resonant chamber, waiting to return home or to go and be seen by the healers. Still others had dispersed throughout the nearby tunnels--going back to their lives, if such a thing was even possible. This Balmera would need a long while to recover before the effects of Imperial rule faded.

Shay sat alone in a dim corner of the chamber, her arms wrapped around her legs and her head pillowed atop. She had her face turned toward the wall, but Hunk knew she wasn’t asleep. That drumbeat of discontent still pounded inside his chest.

Her tension ratcheted higher as Hunk sat beside her. He put his arm around her, doing his best to soothe an ache he couldn’t fully grasp.

She sang to him, lost and lonely, and when she lifted her head, he saw tears in her eyes. “I should be happy for them,” she said.

Hunk leaned his head against hers and watched the shifting glow of a moss lamp in an alcove across from them. “You aren’t?”

She hesitated. “I am glad that the Empire’s foothold here is no more. But I am not as happy as I should be.”

“I don’t think there is a ‘should be’ here, Shay,” he said. “These people have suffered a lot. The fact that they’re free now doesn’t change that.”

She shook her head. “It is not that...” Shay sighed, dropping her chin onto her crossed arms. “They did not need me.”

Hunk frowned. “What do you mean?”

“My people. They do not need me. I am a paladin--a warrior. I should be able to defend my people, to fight so they have no need. Instead, they defended me, and I… I did nothing.”

That much, Hunk understood, and he wished he had more to offer Shay than a hug, but… what was there to say? “You can’t be the hero all the time. It’s a good thing they don’t need Voltron to protect them all the time, right?”

“It is.” She paused. “Do you ever wonder what you missed out on by being a paladin? I cannot say I regret it--I _know_ it was the right thing to do, and I cherish the friends I have made because of my choice. Even so… I did not feel I was giving so much up when I left home.”

Hunk snorted. “I know what you mean. But there’s gonna be a time after the war. You’ll be able to come home, to learn the song, to--to lead your people, and learn from them.” He squeezed her, leaned his head against hers. “That’s what I keep telling myself. We’ve given up a little more than a year so far. Maybe this’ll last a year or two more. That’s not that long, in the grand scheme of things. We still have time to do the things we want to, and not just the thing we _have_ to. I promise.”

She smiled, leaned into his touch. Hummed gratitude and a quiet hope. The ache of what she’d missed out on was still there, but quieter now.

A few minutes later, she’d fallen asleep on Hunk’s shoulder.

* * *

A chime sounded as a message came through on the castle's secure line. Allura's head jerked up as, beside her, Shiro dropped his head into his hands.

"Another?" he asked.

Allura stared at the offending station, which stood a few feet away. She almost didn't even want to look, not after the way the last thirty minutes had gone. But ignoring it wouldn't do them any good, and if she dawdled much longer, Coran was going to read it for her.

Steeling herself, Allura crossed to the screen where they had the inbox pulled up. The message was short and direct, as the last four had been.

"Il’qek," she said, her heart sitting heavy in her chest. "They withdrew just like the rest."

There weren't any details, but Allura suspected that was because Il’qek hadn't offered any up. They'd simply withdrawn from the Alliance quickly and without fanfare, recalling their forces and sending the Coalition ambassadors packing. The Coalition aide who was drafting these memos on behalf of the ruling council had begun by providing all the context they had when Quinnair withdrew three hours ago. An hour later, when Uvora followed suit, they did the same.

More had followed, one after another after another, and the Coalition stopped wasting time spelling out all the things they didn't know. Seven planets had withdrawn from the coalition in less than six hours. They didn't know why, and they didn't know when it would stop. Coalition leaders were too busy reaching out to other worlds who had expressed discontent, hoping to salvage relations before it was too late; they'd spared Shiro just five minutes, and ceded nothing more when Allura raced up to the bridge to join him.

"I don't like this," Allura said. "This many worlds don't just leave for no reason. Not one right after another like this."

Shiro scoffed and dropped down into the seat behind him. "This has to be Keena."

A foot scuffed against the ground, so soft Allura almost didn't hear it, and she registered the faint hiss of the door opening a moment too late. She turned, and her heart stopped at the sight of Keith there, eyes wide and ears flat against his scalp. "Did you say Keena?"

Shiro's shoulders jumped toward his ears, and he spun, launching to his feet and closing the distance to Keith in an instant. He only stopped when Keith fell back a step, his gaze jumping from Shiro to Allura and back again. "Keith," Shiro started.

"What did she do?" Keith asked. His hands had curled into fists at his side, and he glared at the computer screens like they would offer up the answer for him. When they didn't, he turned his glare back to Shiro. "What happened?"

Shiro sighed, but he stepped back, silently inviting Keith to join them at the forward station. "We don't actually have any proof it's Keena, yet, but it seems likely. Seven worlds have just withdrawn from the Coalition."

Keith's head swiveled, the rest of his body following the motion, and he tripped over his own feet, catching himself on the console beside Allura without breaking eye contact with Shiro. " _What?_ "

Allura grimaced. "Precisely. We're working with Coalition leadership right now to try to minimize the damage, but none of these worlds gave any indication they were planning to leave until they did so. We don't know who else may be on the verge, or when they're going to pull the trigger."

" _Vrekt,_ " Keith hissed. He turned to stare at the screen, his head shaking back and forth. "I never should have pissed her off."

Shiro gripped Keith's shoulder, but it was Coran who stepped into the silence, his voice crackling with scarcely controlled rage like Allura had rarely heard from him.

" _None_ of this is your fault," he said. "Even if it is Keena, which I'll admit seems likely, she made this choice a long time ago. The entire reason Kolivan and the rest of the council recalled her was because she'd placed her agents close to the ruling bodies of Coalition worlds."

Keith stared at him. " _These_ worlds?"

"Some of them, yes." Coran pinched the bridge of his nose. "We thought we'd shut her out of these places. Cut her off from her contacts, removed most of them from their post. I'm afraid that doesn't seem to have stopped her. Either she had more agents we didn't know about, or she's rebuilt her network in the last few weeks."

"Or the damage was already done by the time we caught her," Shiro said.

"So now what?" Keith asked. He looked as lost as Allura felt--gutted and uncertain and wondering how the hell to deal with any of this.

Shiro squeezed Keith's shoulder and met Allura's eye, probably sensing her turmoil. She could feel some of the same from him in return, but even stronger was his resolve. "Now?" he said. "Now we figure out what the hell we're going to do about the Vkullor." He gestured helplessly with his free hand. "The only way we're going to save the Coalition at this point is to prove we have a way to deal with the worst Zarkon can throw at us."

“And we need to do it soon.”


	26. The Shenva Quadrant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Previously...]
> 
> Red stared Matt in the eye, their mouth pressed into a thin line and their face otherwise expressionless. "What, exactly, is it you think I lied about? I told you Akira wasn't destroyed when we merged, and he wasn't. I told you the lines between 'Red' and 'Akira' are thin, at best--and I don't know if you saw Akira or only an echo of him, but if you were in the Heart, then... where do you think he came from? He's another facet of my soul now."
> 
> "If that's true, then why don't you remember it?"
> 
> -
> 
> "You know what this is?" Allura asked. She splayed a hand on her chest, surprised to find her heart racing. "I feel as though I'm about to go into battle."
> 
> Shiro stepped forward letting B;acl butt her head against his chest. "You know you can tell us anything."
> 
>  **I do,** Black said, purring as Allura stepped up beside Shiro. **I only worry how you will feel when you hear it.**
> 
> "Whatever it is, I'm sure we can work through it together," Allura said.
> 
> -
> 
> Shiro shook himself, nodded, and looked at Val. "Allura and I need your help."

Val had hardly set foot in Green's hangar before she was accosted by Pidge, whose hair was even more disheveled than usual. "Val!" they cried. "Perfect timing."

Val arched an eyebrow. "Perfect timing for what?"

Pidge waved a hand backwards over their shoulder toward their desk. They had three screens up, a tablet on the desktop, four or five half-finished devices spilling their guts everywhere. (Maybe six? It was hard to tell when they were all shoved to one side, pressed up against one another and mixing together.) Their toolkit, too, was open and scattered--not only across the desk, but all over the hangar, a screwdriver poking out from under the desk, a pair of pliers abandoned on Green's paw.

"Distraction," Pidge said. "Or at least redirection. I've been staring at this problem for hours, and I'm no closer to solving it."

"What problem is that?"

Pidge gave her a dirty look--she supposed asking about the problem _was_ sort of the opposite of a distraction--but answered anyway. "Tracking the Vkullor. I want it to be possible, but I just don't see how it _is._ The Vkullor's basically the universe's most advanced cloaking tech, except it's biological, so I can't even hack it. Hunk and I drew up a list of everything we could possibly think of that might make for a workable tracking method, and there are exactly two things we know of that it doesn't block: visible light, and the lion bonds."

"Lion bonds?"

Pidge nodded. "Yeah. The lions' comms are based around the bond. We're pretty sure that's why we were still able to use them when we went up against the Vkullor. We can't test it until the next time we have to try to divert it away from inhabited airspace, but we're pretty sure we wouldn't be able to contact anyone besides the other lions and the castle's primary comms line. Problem _is,_ the secrets of how those comms systems were built was lost with ancient Altea. So _congratulations_. If we physically follow the Vkullor around forever, we _might_ be able to track it that way. If it doesn't notice its tail and eat them."

Val made a face. "So, uh... that's a no on the tracking, then."

"I'm not ready to say that just yet," Pidge said through clenched teeth. "There has to be a way, and I'm not giving up until I find it."

"But you are ready for a break."

"A short one. I just need to stop beating my head against the same wall for a little while, come at this with fresh eyes. If anything's going to work, it's going to have to be something no one's ever tried before--cause people have been trying to track Vkullor for a _long_  time, and if anyone had succeeded, we _all_  would know. It'd probably have revolutionized transportation and communication across the entire universe, because whatever it is, it's at the _very_  least more reliable than what we have now."

Val made a face, but it wasn't like she knew anything about tracking, or interstellar communication. Pidge had plenty of people to go to if that was the sort of help they were looking for--but it wasn't. They wanted a distraction.

...Not that Val had any ideas. She'd honestly only come down here because Green was nagging her to, probably because Green had front row seats to see Pidge tear themself apart over this. It was early evening, and Shiro, Allura, and Lance were all still out on political damage control, holding the Coalition together with spit and strength of will and leaving everyone else under strict orders to find an answer to the Vkullor problem, stat.

Well, Val had had exactly zero luck on that front, and was rapidly running out of avenues to try. She'd watched all the videos in the archives, read every bit of research the Olkari had forwarded on, and she was flat-out stuck. She had nothing.

"I wonder if magic isn't our best bet," she said, dropping onto one of Pidge's beanbags with a huff.

Pidge cocked their head to the side. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, magic can do almost anything, as far as I can tell. There's _so_ much variation, and even the guy who trained us in it admitted they didn't know the limits of magic. Maybe there's a form of magic that's the perfect counter to the Vkullor--either in terms of tracking it or outright beating it."

Pidge curled one leg beneath them as they sat on the other beanbag opposite Val, staring into the distance. "You could be onto something. Only problem is, it took you guys _months_  to learn to do what you do. If we need to train up in a _new_  form of magic, how long is that going to take? Maybe if we study the magic and try to replicate it somehow...?"

"Replicate it?" Val asked. "What, like a specific ability?"

"Or magic in general," Pidge said. "I don't know. Is there some inherent quality to magic that we can make use of? Or is it the specific abilities that matter? I have no idea, that's for sure."

"I don't know, either. As far as I know, the only common thread is Quintessence, but if that was all that mattered, you could just shoot a bunch of concentrated Quintessence at the Vkullor and kill it."

Pidge cocked their head to the side. "I mean... have we ever _actually_  tried that? No. So maybe it _would_  work."

Val snorted. "Right. And maybe we could just sing it to death."

"Ha, ha." Pidge shifted suddenly, crossing their legs and gripping their ankles as they leaned forward. "Let me study you."

Arching an eyebrow, Val leaned away from Pidge. "What do you mean, _study_?"

They waved a hand. "I don't know. Watch you. Measure some things. Try some things out maybe. I want to know how this works, just in case it is actually helpful. I should probably study you and Allura _and_ Matt--get a baseline and a scope of magic all at once, you know? See what I can figure out about how each of your magics works, see if I can find any common denominators at the same time. And then... go from there?"

Val considered that for a moment. She was a little wary of giving Pidge a green light without any sort of caveats whatsoever, but at the same time, maybe they were onto something. It wasn't like conventional weapons were going to help here, but neither could Val imagine that bilocation was the Vkullor's secret weakness. There was certainly no way she could bilocate _with_ something that size, and she'd never bilocated only a part of a larger whole before, either. That only left bilocating _herself_  into some vital organ, which.... no thanks.

"Fine," she said at length. "You can study me. Just... don't go all mad scientist on me?"

"You got it." Pidge lunged forward, bent nearly double over their legs, and grinned at Val. "There's so much I've always wondered about bilocation, but it always seemed like the wrong time to ask."

"Well... I've got nothing better to do right now, so... Shoot."

"What does it feel like?"

"Bilocating?" Val scratched her cheek. "It doesn't feel like much. I didn't realized what I was _doing_ the first couple times, and it's still hard for the version of me that stays behind to know whether or not it worked. From that perspective, I sit and focus, and then... I guess if I focus hard enough I can kinda feel this--echo, I guess. Like my heart beat's reflecting back at me from the other body. Otherwise, nothing at all changes until I snap back together."

"And for the other you?"

Val shrugged. "It's not all that different, except that at some point I'm suddenly somewhere else."

"How much can you take with you?"

"Not much so far. The clothes I'm wearing. Objects small enough to hold in one hand--maybe an armful of something, I guess. Anything bigger than that gets left behind, same as people."

"And-- What _happens_ to things you're holding when you bilocate? Like, do you transport them, or do you make a duplicate like you make a duplicate of yourself? Could you make a second _bayard_  that way?"

"Woah, there," Val said. "Slow down. I've never summoned my bayard before bilocating, but even if I did wind up with a bayard for both of me, what would it matter? The extra one would just disappear when I snap back."

" _Does_ it duplicate?"

Val crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow. "Well, I've yet to leave myself naked on either end, so it seems like the answer is a resounding yes."

"And the duplicate disappears when you rejoin with yourself?" Pidge asked. "Even if you set the extra one down?"

Val scratched her cheek. "I mean, I don't exactly stick around to see what happens, but I know that sometimes when I leave something behind--like if I took off a jacket or whatever--when I get back, the original one is gone. I assume when the original sticks around it's because the duplicate has disappeared."

For some reason, that seemed to excite Pidge, who launched to their feet and ran to grab a pen from their desk. "Can I see?" They shoved the pen at Val, all but vibrating in anticipation. "Bilocate over to the desk there and set the pen down, then dismiss the bilocation."

Val couldn't deny she was kind of curious now, too. She rarely bilocated across such a short range--there usually wasn't any point in wasting the energy. But now she was starting to wish she'd taken more time to investigate her bilocation on a small scale, instead of just diving into the big things like flinging herself and a passenger halfway across the known universe.

Before she could do anything, however, the comms burst to life, starting Val into dropping the pen.

"All paladins report to the bridge. All paladins, to the bridge."

* * *

"What's going on?" Lance asked, bursting onto the bridge. "Vkullor?"

Allura shook her head. "Dark Voltron." She waved him over to the station where she and Shiro had pulled up a video, a transcript of the distress call, and several other windows of information. "We'll go over it all once everyone's here, but feel free to take a look in the mean time."

Once he'd nodded, she turned to Shiro, pulling him a few feet to the side and speaking to him in a low voice. He seemed fixated on the screen, almost dazed, but not scared or worried or anything. Lance might have expected that. Even when it was a normal mission, Shiro put a lot of pressure on himself, always worrying about anything that could go wrong, always taking it on himself to make sure everyone got home in one piece. Considering the way Klenahn had gone, Lance _very_  much would have expected Shiro to be more stressed than ever at the prospect of a battle against Dark Voltron.

Instead, he seemed almost... excited? His fingers kept twitching, and his head whipped toward the door every time it opened, scanning the room like he was doing a head count. Lance tried to focus on the information displayed on the screen, but his eyes darted to Shiro every time Shiro glanced at the door.

"Hey," Lance said at length, giving up on prepping himself and turning to Shiro and Allura. "Are we calling Hunk and Shay back for this? If the new Dark Red is ready for action..."

"We'll need Voltron," Shiro said with a nod. "I wish we could have given them a couple more days to rest, but you're right; we already gave them a call."

Sure enough, Hunk and Shay arrived just a few minutes after the rest of the paladins. Val was sitting forward in the green paladin's station, elbows on her knees and hands folded in front of her face. She stared at Shiro and Allura with an intensity that warned off anyone who might have tried to draw her into speculation. And there was plenty of speculation. Several of Zarkon's lions were visible in the video looping on the screens, so everyone knew what this call was about, and it was a pretty safe bet that if the dark Lions were out in the field again, it meant Dark Voltron was once more on the table.

Mainly what the others were speculating about was the target, and Val didn't seem to care about that.

"Sorry we're late," Hunk said, bursting into the room with Shay on his heels. "Took us a little while to get back to Yellow. What'd we miss?"

"Nothing yet," Shiro said. He must have been holding himself back while he waited, and now that everyone was here he came alive, sweeping to the front of the group and swiping the screen to enlarge the video feed. "As you can see, Zarkon and his lions are back in play. We received a distress call from a Coalition fleet stationed in the Shenva Quadrant. Unfortunately, by the time the distress call made its way to _us_ , scouts had already reported a total loss."

Lance's stomach twisted at that. How many people had just died, snuffed out all at once like it was nothing? How many--he hated to even think it, but the Coalition was hurting for raw military might-- How many ships had they just lost?

"The Shenva Quadrant is sparsely inhabited," Allura said. "It's located in a distant corner of the Empire, where Zarkon's grip is weak. Many of the planets we and our allies have managed to free lie beyond this region of space, and only a few within it. The Coalition had set it up as a defensive zone, using technology derived from New Altea's exclusionary zone to detect and disrupt wormholes the Empire attempts to open into the more vulnerable territory beyond."

"Do the fighting where there aren't as many worlds to serve as collateral damage," Lance said, nodding along. "How long do we have until Dark Voltron enters populated space?"

"An hour," Shiro said. "Maybe two. Zarkon shouldn't be able to use wormholes to progress any farther; they would just spit him out back on the edge of the quadrant--but the lions are fast. We don't know how fast, exactly, but we're going to assume they can travel, as a group, about as fast as we can."

"We have any eyes on them now that they've crushed that first fleet?" Meri asked.

"Unfortunately, no." Allura called up the hologram star map, and the Shenva Quadrant expanded around them. "The attack took place here," she said, gesturing with two fingers so that the program indicated a particular location in red. She strode forward, coming to a stop near the center of the ring of paladin stations and gesturing once more. "This is Alshere, the nearest populated planet and a Coalition member world. The last reports had Dark Voltron moving in this general direction, so we're assuming Alshere is their target."

"And if it's not?" Pidge asked.

Allura moved again, this time stopping outside the ring, nearly as far back as the Blue and Yellow stations. "Byviun," she said. "Not a Coalition world, but not a priority for Zarkon, either. The Empire invaded it once, when it first swept through this region of space, but its people are too physically frail to make for good slave labor, and the planet too resource-poor to be worth holding. In the three thousand years since, the population has recovered from that initial attack, but their technology still lags behind that of Alshere. They have no contact with other planets and no way to travel beyond their own solar system."

"So they're defenseless," Matt said.

"Against Dark Voltron?" Shiro asked. "Most worlds are. We believe Zarkon will target Alshere because of its membership in the Coalition, but we've already sent scouts to the vicinity of Byviun just in case. And in the event that neither world is his aim, it will take him half a day to reach the next inhabited system. Other Coalition fleets in the area have been alerted and instructed to lie low, so even if Zarkon went hunting, he would have a hard time finding them."

Lance scratched his chin as he scanned the map. "Okay, so how are _we_  supposed to stop this? If we can't wormhole into the area, we're just going to be chasing them from massacre to massacre. We may never catch up."

Pidge hummed, staring intently at the red dot that was Alshere--or its star, at least. "I've read up on this tech. It's not quite the same as New Altea's. Too expensive and time-consuming to be a wide-spread solution. Not to mention we're trying to cover a much larger region of space. We're working on setting up exclusionary zones around inhabited worlds, but they're going to be much smaller than New Altea's--six hours instead of three days at the last projection--and we're months away from getting them all up and running.

"In the mean time, we've got a jury-rigged system that _mostly_ does the same thing for the entire region. The Coalition has deployed sensors all over liberated space just looking for wormhole activity. Anyone tries to open a wormhole in the protected zone, the system flags it, and most of the time that wormhole gets redirected by a separate system so it spits you out outside the defensive zone, in the Shenva Quadrant. There are some trajectories the system can't catch, though, so if you know what you're doing--or if you get _really_  lucky--you can slip through."

"Very few people know about that loophole, though," Allura said sternly. "And what you just heard doesn't leave this room. The longer we can go without Zarkon realizing there's a trick to getting through it, the safer our people are, and the more exclusionary zones we can get up and running."

"But it means we can get in, and cut Zarkon off," Keith said. "That's what you're saying, right?"

Pidge pointed a finger at him. "Exactly."

"Except, if we do this right, we won't be cutting him off," Shiro said. "We want to try to make it look like we caught up to him, to disguise the fact that we used wormholes."

Lance's brow furrowed. That sounded tricky, but he could see why they'd made that call. If all of Voltron suddenly appeared deeper into Coalition territory than Dark Voltron, Zarkon would know at once what had happened, and he would start looking for the trick to getting through the Coalition's defenses. Considering the resources he had on his side, it likely wouldn't take long to crack it.

"How do we decide where to come in?"

Shiro smiled, and turned to Keith and Matt. "We send in Red."

Keith cocked his head to the side. "What do you mean?"

Allura returned to Shiro's side and swiped at the indicator of Dark Voltron's attack. A path sprang up, connecting that site to Alshere. "If Zarkon is headed to Alshere as we believe he is, based on our estimates of his traveling speed, we expect him to be somewhere in this region." She highlighted a stretch of the flight path about a quarter of the way to Alshere.

Shiro pinched at a region of space a bit further back and a bit to one side of the highlighted region. "We'll send Red in here and have you scout ahead. Once you've located the dark lions, let us know and the rest of us will come through. That way we don't accidentally open a wormhole where Zarkon can see it, but we don't have to chase him any farther than absolutely necessary."

"Works for me," Matt said. He bumped Keith's shoulder with his elbow. "Let's go."

* * *

"Shiro has a plan," Matt said. It came out of the blue, ten minutes out from the castle. Red stood silent and stiff between them, their mind diffusing through the bond, quiet and attentive. The tension between Red and Matt was as thick as ever, but it seemed to have gone to ground. Matt had hardly even reacted when he saw Red waiting for them in the cockpit. He _ignored_  them, sure, but there were no dirty looks, no spike of fury or resentment as they slipped into the bond.

Red seemed to be expecting something anyway. They stared at the floor, flinched as Matt walked past them, and said nothing as they took flight. If anything, they seemed to be trying to fade into the background of the bond, to make themself invisible. Keith still found his mind drawn between the two of them, trying to decipher what had passed--he knew that Matt's encounter with Akira in the Heart had been a sticking point for them, and that Matt had confronted Red about it.

The curious part was how, while Red seemed cowed by whatever argument they'd had, Matt seemed to have almost been pacified.

He was definitely the most focused of them.

"What do you mean?" Keith asked, slow to process Matt's statement. "Isn't _this_  the plan?"

Matt breathed out, a little bit exasperated, a little bit thoughtful. All around them was empty space, and it was Red who was keeping them on track to follow Dark Voltron's most likely trajectory. That left Keith and Matt with nothing to do but keep an eye on the scanners for signs of the dark lions and think.

Frowning, Keith tried to follow Matt's train of thought.

"Didn't you see him?" Matt asked. "Back at the briefing. He and Allura were real intent on whatever they were muttering about when we came in, and they kept trading these _looks_. They've got something up their sleeve, but they don't seem to want to say anything yet. I wonder why."

"Does it matter?" Keith asked. "If they've got a plan, that's good."

"And if they don't want us to know about it, that's _bad._ " Matt shook his head, his unease leaking into the bond. "Either they're afraid we're going to get angry because they're doing something extreme, or it's risky and they don't want to worry us if they don't have to, or... I don't know."

Keith could feel it now, the tension running beneath Matt's skin. Sam Holt was out there somewhere. Rolo, Rax, and Zuza, too. Dark Voltron was a powerful enemy, but a difficult one, too, because they had to be careful not to hit too hard. 

Matt was afraid whatever Shiro had planned might put Sam's life at risk.

But Shiro wouldn't do that. Not ever, not even if it was a last resort. Oh, he was perfectly willing to sacrifice himself to keep his team safe, but ask him to sacrifice someone else-- _anyone_  else, much less a friend? Shiro would be the first to shoot that plan down.

"No, you're right," Matt said before Keith could say anything aloud. "I'm just being paranoid.

"You have every right to be paranoid. He's your dad."

A flicker of amusement lightened Matt's mind. "Your dad, too, now."

That brought Keith up short, his mouth hanging open as he searched for a retort. _Sam_  hadn't adopted him, and Keith wouldn't begrudge him distancing himself from Keith if and when they brought him home. But he couldn't very well go telling Matt that. He saw it at a glance: as far as Matt was concerned, Keith was a Holt, and that meant Sam didn't have a choice in the matter. Or maybe he was just that sure Sam would feel the same way as the rest of his family.

(It seemed to be asking a lot to Keith, but... he had to admit the concept had some appeal. Vorsek had been, if possible, a worse father than Keena a mother, and Keith had given up thinking of him that way years before he died. It would be nice to actually _have_  a dad.)

Fortunately at that moment, something on the scanner caught Matt's attention. His mind veered away from Keith, and Keith's was dragged along with it, Red slowly rousing to peek over their metaphorical shoulders at the screen.

"Is it them?" Keith asked.

Matt furrowed his brow. "Maybe." He brought up more information on the Quintessence pocket the BLIP-tech had detected. At such a great range, they couldn't tell much--certainly nothing like species or number or size of lifeforms. Just that it was Quintessence strong enough to be an anomaly in deep space but nowhere near the level of a planet or a self-sufficient ship or space station. It could have been a Coalition patrol, Keith supposed, but they were supposed to be lying low, and that meant not going after Zarkon and his super-weapons while broadcasting their presence to the galaxy at large.

Matt's mind went quiet as Keith leaned harder on the throttle. They were already going as fast as Red could sustain, but at Keith's prompting, they offered up another little burst, closing the distance to the signals just enough to get more details.

A sudden chill spread through the bond as Red's breath caught. Keith twisted to look at them and found them staring out the viewscreen, eyes wide open but unfocused.

"Red?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

They shook their head and slowly pulled the unease back behind their mental walls. "I don't know. Something's..."

They trailed off, but Keith felt an echo of it, before they shut him out. A little like deja vu, a little like foreboding, it left him feeling anxious and ill at ease. Something was different about Dark Voltron this time around, and he wasn't sure he wanted to find out what it was.

"That's them," Keith said, reaching out to Matt for confirmation. He'd felt it, too, and it left him every bit as unsettled as Keith. But, like Keith, he knew that whatever it was Red had sensed, it was coming from Dark Voltron. It had to be.

Matt called back to the castle, and Shiro answered at once. "We found them," Matt said. No point in wasting time, after all; everyone was waiting on their go-ahead. Looked like Shiro and Allura were already in Black and everything. "Too far away for a visual confirmation, but we're positive. And this way, they probably haven't seen us. Definitely won't pick up your wormhole."

"Great work," Shiro said--and now that Matt had Keith thinking about it, he could hear a sort of breathlessness in Shiro's voice. It was anticipation, but it wasn't the usual pre-battle jitters. (Keith didn't think he'd ever _seen_ Shiro get jittery before a battle.) This was something different, and the energy of it settled into Keith's chest and began to vibrate.

"Opening the wormhole now," Allura said. "We're coming in a short distance behind you, so just hold tight and we'll be with you shortly."

"You got it," Matt said. He ended the transmission and reached out to Keith, curious and paranoid and trying despite it all to let his trust in Shiro win out.

This time, Keith didn't have any words of comfort to offer. He could feel it: something big was about to happen.

* * *

By the time Shay entered the wormhole, the trembling in her hands had calmed, Yellow's strength--and that of her adjuncts--steadying her for the battle ahead. She could not shake the knowledge that Rax would be there, tantalizingly close once more. She wanted to hope that they would get him home, but she knew too well that it would not happen. Their priority today had to be to get Dark Voltron away from Coalition space, and that meant they could not risk an attempt to separate one of the Lions, to subdue it and rescue the pilot.

However much she wanted to save her brother, they would need much more luck, and much better conditions, to make the attempt.

Hunk's sympathy reached her from the depths of the Yellow Lion, where he had already entrenched himself in anticipation of the battle ahead. The enemy was still only a faint reading on the BLIP-tech, but within moments of leaving the wormhole, Shay and the others joined the Red Lion, who turned at once and took off toward Dark Voltron.

Shay pushed the engines to their maximum, Yellow pouring everything she had into speed. Hunk diverted power from the weapons and shields temporarily to give the engines an extra boost. It left her feeling exposed, but for now they needed the speed. Yellow was the slowest of the Lions, and the team needed to move as quickly as possible if they wanted to catch up to Zarkon before he came dangerously close to Alshere.

They flew, every one of them silent, the anticipation thick in the air. Somewhere on the fringes of her awareness, Shay thought she could sense the quiet, expectant minds of her fellow paladins--not as strongly as she could have were they in a Voltron formation, but strong enough that she was certain she wasn't imagining things. It must have been an artifact of their strengthening bonds, just as Shay was able to sense Hunk's emotional state when they were together even outside of the Lion.

It was not the tension that surprised her, however. It was the thrill that filled the Green and Black Lions, a hum of anticipation with a brighter tone than what the rest of them were feeling. It pricked her curiosity, and she stopped focusing so much on flying, instead letting her mind diffuse in an attempt to catch what the others were thinking about.

The signal on the scanners grew ever stronger, inching closer as the paladins closed the distance. Once or twice, Red surged ahead, only to loop back after a brief moment. It was as though Keith and Matt were itching for battle--or perhaps just itching to move faster than what the other Lions were capable of. 

Shay knew the moment Zarkon noticed their presence. There was a moment of anticipation in the air around them, a sudden bristling from the Red Lion, and then the signals on the BLIP-tech suddenly swept toward them as the dark Lions turned around.

"All right," Shiro said, still with that thrill chasing his words, lodging breathless in Shay's chest. "Here we go. Hold them off, try to drive them back toward the edge of the defensive zone. This is going to be a long fight."

That it was. Even at top speed, it would take easily an hour to clear the defensive zone. If Zarkon had his lions fight back the entire way, it would quickly grow to much longer than that. But what else could they do? Dark Voltron could not be allowed to proceed, and the paladins couldn't conscience destroying any of the dark lions except perhaps Zarkon's.

Shortly thereafter, there was no time to think about how long this battle was going to last. The dark lions descended on them in a wave.

Three of them did, at any rate. Dark Green, Dark Yellow, and Dark Blue seemed once more to be Zarkon's front-line fighters. They appeared in the distance, first as faint lights like stars, then as streaks of color, rapidly moving closer. By the time they were close enough for Shay to make out any details, they had already opened fire.

It was as sickening as the last time she had seen them: lions made to look too much like the real Lions of Voltron, dark and twisted versions of the ones Shay had come to think of as friends. Knowing that Rax and the others flew them only made it worse.

Hunk quickly reversed the modifications he had made, bolstering Yellow's shields and restoring power to her weapons as the battle began. Shay struck back where she could, aiming for weapons first and engines second--weapons to keep the lions from doing any damage, either to Shay and her teammates or to innocents, should Zarkon try to slip away; engines because however much she knew their aim here was not to disable the lions and rescue their pilots, part of her couldn't help but want it.

Mostly, though, she did what she always did, and acted as a shield for the other paladins. Zarkon's lions did not hold back, and Yellow could take their attacks better than the others, Green and Red in particular. So she left them to do most of the attacking, and she focused on keeping the enemy at bay.

Zarkon himself stayed out of the fight, as he had the last time they crossed paths. Oddly, Dark Red stayed beside him, quiet and still. Alone of all the dark lions, Dark Red's eyes glowed golden, the soft blue glow of natural Quintessence pulsing at her joints. She still had the dark, jarring paint job of all Zarkon's lions, but... something about her was different.

Shay tried not to think about it. Not until Zarkon decided to send her in, at any rate. Until then, they had enough to deal with.

* * *

It wasn't right.

Red screwed their eyes shut, willfully ignoring the voice in the back of their mind that kept trying to pull them out of the battle.

_Focus._

Their paladins needed them to be sharp.

It was a strange feeling, this. Red wasn't normally one to struggle with focus. With focusing on the _right_ thing, perhaps, but they had always thrown themself into whatever they did, whole-heartedly and without regret. Mostly without regret.

The regret came later.

But today something kept nagging them. Something... Some familiarity, some detail about this fight, about the enemy, about Zarkon... Even as they tried to give their all to keeping the lion body responsive, to meshing with their paladins--fading into the shadows so Keith and Matt could shine--they kept thinking that they were forgetting something. It was a horrible feeling, and they kept spiraling down trails of tangled thoughts, searching for answers that weren't there.

Something slammed into them, derailing all of Red's thoughts as the impact sent them staggering into Keith's seat. Their eyes flew open, and they grabbed onto the seat to keep themself upright, panic flashing through all three minds as Keith and Matt fought to steady the lion. Red responded instinctively, closing their eyes and letting the motion flow through them.

"You guys all right?" Lance called.

Keith grunted, wound too tight for words. Red felt it, too. The fear. The confusion.

"What the _fuck_  was that?" Matt asked. His voice was shaking. He left off the rest of what he wanted to say: How had none of them seen it coming? Keith and Matt had a wider field of vision than any of the other paladins, and Red...

Well, Red was usually much more attuned to their surroundings, but that was difficult to do when they kept letting themself get distracted.

They screwed their eyes shut, counting their breaths, and forced their awareness to move outside themself. Whatever they thought they felt, they could deal with it later. Just breathe. Just make it through the fight.

A flash of red caught Matt's eye, and they turned toward it, weapons primed and ready, the voices of the other paladins ringing loud in their ears. They turned, and they saw--

A street, familiar yet foreign. They'd been here before.

A battle, Galra and Alteans on all side. Robeasts in the street. Smoke rising from the city skyline and beacons of orange light marking where the beasts had fallen.

A creature, smaller than the rest. Less mechanical.

A _kotha_ , only not.

 _Red_ , only not.

A fury not their own, rising from the pit of their stomach and overwhelming all else. How dare she? How _dare_ she?

Some small, quiet corner of their mind recognized this. This was New Altea, months ago now, the first time they'd taken control of Akira's body, the earliest echo of their union. They hadn't felt, before, his powerlessness. The fear he'd felt, pushed down deep, the horror of realizing he wasn't in control of his own body.

They felt it now, and they felt it as their own as their eyes snapped open and the scene of the street and the _kotha_  vanished. They saw instead Zarkon's Red Lion, golden eyes blazing, mouth open in a roar as it looped around for another attack.

And a familiar rage rose within them. Rage and revulsion and a hatred so powerful it made Red feel small and powerless.

_**How dare she?** _

* * *

_Rage._

It hit Matt so hard and fast it overrode every other intention. One moment he and Keith were hanging back, keenly aware of the threat the last Dark Red had posed and watching to see whether this one would prove to be the same. 

The next, all thoughts of playing it safe fled their minds, and they lunged forward, slamming into Dark Red with no regard for their own safety. Matt felt the collision in his teeth, but he didn't care. He wanted to _destroy_  this thing.

Dark Red twisted free, blasting Red with its laser before taking off.

"Matt! Keith!" Allura barked. "What are you doing?"

Her voice broke through the rage, and Matt shivered as he came back to himself. The rage that had consumed him suddenly withdrew--no less powerful than before, but more distant. At a growl from behind, he turned to find Red glaring out the viewscreen, one lip pulled back, their hands shaking as they gripped the back of the two pilot's chairs.

"Red?" Matt asked. "What's wrong?"

"That _thing,_ " they said. "That--abomination."

The attention of the other paladins turned their way, even as the battle raged on. Zarkon still hung back, and Black had joined Blue in keeping Dark Red at bay--but they were all hanging on Red's words.

"What about it?" Allura asked.

Red breathed, a shaky breath that seemed far more rattled than Matt had ever seen from either Red or Akira. "It's me. That _bitch_  used _me_  to make her monster. She didn't come to Oriande to kill me--she came to _steal_  me, to recreate me as her slave." Their voice dropped low, something dark and twisted pulling at their face. "And she succeeded."

Matt's heart lodged in his throat, and he turned back to his scanners, calling up the species analysis of the dark lions. It was, as always, a muddy mix of species: Galra and human and Balmeran, swirled together with Weblum, Balmera, and Niskaia until it was difficult to pick anything out, but when Matt compared it to Red's own Quintessence signature, the system returned a probable match.

The fury returned in force, but this time it didn't come from Red. It came from Matt himself, and from Keith, a protective rage that darkened the edges of his vision. He had his issues with Red; he'd fought with them, and still resented them for the things they'd done, but right now none of that mattered. They didn't deserve this.

And Matt was going to tear that thing to shreds.

" _Matt,_ " Shiro said, stern, like he was scolding a child. "Stop."

Matt pulled up as Black cut between Red and Dark Red. "Get out of my way, Shiro. That thing needs to die."

" _Zuza's_  in there, man," Lance said. "I know it's messed up, but we can blast it to bits once we get her back."

Matt shook his head, ready to argue--or to simply dodge around Black and attack anyway. Red was fast enough; if the three of them really wanted to, none of the others could stop them from going after Dark Red.

"Later, Matt," Shiro said. He'd softened his voice, as though recognizing the emotions raging through Red's cockpit. "We _will_  stop that thing, but right now, we have something more important to do."

Matt rolled his eyes, but Shiro leaned on him, exuding calm that stifled the raging storm inside him. Matt huffed, but relented. "Yeah, yeah, I know. We need to focus on the people of Alshere."

Shiro was silent for too long, and Matt glanced at the comms, where he found an odd, conflicted look on his face. "No," he said at length, grunting as Dark Red slammed into Black's side. "I mean, yes, Alshere is important, but I was talking about something else."

In the feed from the Green Lion, Val suddenly smiled, and Pidge turned to stare at her--which left them open to an attack from Dark Green, whose laser attack lit up their cockpit white for a moment.

"What _are_ you talking about, then?" Hunk asked. "What are we here for?"

Shiro smiled. "A chance."

* * *

_The lights of the Heart of the Black Lion glittered all around Shiro as he embraced Black, who stood before him and Allura in her kotha form. The shallow ocean rippled around their feet, the reflected stars dancing like the beating of Shiro's heart. Black seemed uncertain, almost apologetic, and still holding back from speaking her mind.  
_

_"Whatever it is, I'm sure we can work through it together," Allura said. Her mind was intertwined with Shiro's, intertwined with Black's, but neither of them could pierce Black's mental veil. "We all made that promise, didn't we?"_

_Black nodded._ **This is something different, however. Not a burden of my own, but a decision that affects us all--one I cannot make alone.**

_"Tell us," Shiro said, pulling back just far enough to look her in the eye. "And then we'll go from there."_

_Black purred, the sound rumbling in Shiro's chest._ **I need an adjunct,**   _she said at length. She lifted her head to look at Allura, her eyes blazing like stars pulled down from the sky._ **The two of** _ **you**_ **need an adjunct.**

_Her words caught Shiro by surprise, though he wasn't sure why they should have. Every other lion had already chosen an adjunct, and those adjuncts had begun taking a more active role in the war--Coran as Captain of the Castle of Lions, Karen as a key adviser in legal and political matters, Akira as Commander of the Voltron Guard--and now, however much Shiro hated it, as the vessel of the Red Lion. Even the Kahales were always doing something for the team, for refugees, for the Balmera... It was impossible not to notice that Shiro and Allura were now the only paladins without an adjunct._

_"It's not a big deal," Shiro said, running his hand down Black's neck. "We have support from the team. We're getting by. And I know we all have a lot to worry about, but you shouldn't feel like you need to hurry and pick an adjunct for our sake."_

_"You want to choose the right person," Allura said, stepping close enough now that her shoulder brushed against Shiro's. "That's not a bad thing."_

**It is true I have been struggling,** _Black admitted._ **I know what I want in an adjunct, but it's something I cannot give you--someone who has been where you are. Someone who understands the struggles you face and can help guide you through them. ...I mean to ask _you_ to be my adjuncts, when the time comes. ****To lend your wisdom and experience to the next generation. But there is none I can ask to be that for you. I can only try to choose one who will bring you some peace of mind.**

_She looked at Shiro as she said this, her eyes intense, hesitation slipping back into her voice. Shiro had only just begun to wrap his head around the idea of becoming Black's adjunct, of being a mentor for the one who would succeed him--and now, suddenly, all thoughts of the future were washed away._

Someone who will bring you some peace of mind.

_"Sam."_

_Allura's hands flew to her mouth as Black nodded, earnest but uncertain, the ocean rippling in sympathy until it seemed a storm was upon them.  
_

_"We can do that?" Allura asked. Her shock and eagerness swept around them like a breeze--too gentle to be called a storm, almost giddy--and Black's hope rose to meet it._

**It will take some doing, but if I can make contact with him, I can establish the bond.**

_Shiro's mind was silent and still in the midst of the flurry of activity that danced around him. Allura and Black went back and forth, a rapid-fire exchange of silent questions and gifted understanding. The adjunct bond cared nothing for distance; once it was established, not even Keturah could tear it apart. All Black needed was a moment of connection, an instant to extend an invitation._

**There is one more thing,** _Black said._ **Where Sam is now, the things he is dealing with... This would not be an adjunct bond as we originally conceived of them. It would be inverted, at least in part. An adjunct is meant to support you, to share your burdens and lend you strength. If we did this,** _**you** _ **would need to support** _**him**_ **. I could not ask anything of him in return. Not now.**

 _Shiro was already tearing up, his throat too tight to speak. He wanted to say that Black had nothing to worry about. She didn't_ need  _to ask anything of Sam; the bond as she had described it would in itself ease Shiro's burdens._

_Allura placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him when he turned her way._

_"I can't answer for you," he whispered. "I won't. He would be your adjunct, too."_

_Allura's smiled softened, and she shook her head. "I can think of none better."_

* * *

Even before they formed Voltron, Val could feel the anticipation building. Pidge, of course, was about to vibrate right out of their skin, their attention buzzing in Val's skull as they went digging for more details. But she could even feel Matt's tumultuous hope, and the way it conflicted over the white hot simmering anger over what Keturah had done to Red. The end result even made Val sick to her stomach, and she was just watching him on the screen.

Watching him, and dealing with some sort of hyper-empathy, like maybe Coran's adjunct powers had leaked over into his paladins.

Zarkon's Black Lion finally moved as Pidge blasted Dark Blue square in the eyes, leaving it disoriented long enough for Shay to headbutt it into Dark Yellow.

"It's time," Shiro said, not even waiting for Zarkon to call the rest of his lions to him. "Form Voltron!"

Val's head spun as the formation came together, the thunderstorm of emotions she'd been sensing raging into the foreground. (It wasn't in her head, as it turned out; she actually had been sensing the other paladins.)

This thought echoed back at her from all sides, confusion and curiosity entering the fray. Shiro and Allura raced outward through the bond, drawing everyone's attention, sharpening their collective focus to Dark Voltron as it came together a short distance away.

"We're not sure exactly what to expect with this," Allura said. "Val's going to try to carry Black's consciousness to Sam, and Shiro and I may or may not be carried along. In case we are, Lance?"

He nodded before she could even finish asking, the weight of command settling on him. "I'm on it."

"Good. Whenever you're ready, Val."

Val took a deep breath and glanced at Pidge. "Give 'em hell while I'm under."

Pidge smiled back, a sharp edge of anxiety making it a little wan, but a moment later, Val had bigger things to focus on. She'd never entered the Heart during battle before, and certainly not from the Voltron formation. But Green was ready and waiting to help her along, and almost instantly she was falling.

She landed on her feet on the island where the tower stood--but this time, she stood at the volcano's peak, a lake of lava simmering fifty feet below her inside the crater. Breathless, she stared out over the sea, searching...

The Heart looked no different now than it always had, but it _felt_  smaller, as though a single step could carry her to any of the other Lions' domains. She could see them all in the distance--the jungle, the canyons, the lava fields shrouded in mist, and the starry stretch of night to the north.

A purr came to her on the wind, rumbling like thunder and calling her deeper. Balanced on a narrow outcropping, Val leaned forward, and lifted her foot.

She shifted between one heartbeat and the next, letting herself follow Black's call. She was running on instinct now, as she had known she must. What she was about to try was just like what she'd done to bring Pidge to Sam, and just enough different to worry her. Dark Voltron was close enough that Val likely could have physically bilocated into Dark Green's cockpit, no trip to the Heart required.

She, Shiro, and Allura had decided against that for two reasons. First, because Zarkon was already likely to pick up on the visitors inside his version of Voltron, and having a physical presence there would make that possibility a guarantee. Second, because she didn't know if she could bring Black along without first coming here. She couldn't bring other people with her when she bilocated, and she doubted she could have held onto Black's mind any better, not without a bond like the one she shared with Green or Blue.

Shiro, Allura, and the Black Lion were all waiting for her when she arrived in the shallow sea. Black wore her kotha form, the same one Val had seen when she and the other blues had spoken with all the lions in the Heart. She stood as tall as Shiro, her fur as black as the night sky but shimmering iridescent blue and violet, her eyes blazing bright.

Val opened her mouth, trying to find the words to tell Shiro that she probably couldn't take him. She'd warned him once already, the last time they'd talked about this plan of theirs, but she wasn't sure if he remembered.

He spared her the trouble when he placed a hand on her shoulder. "Just focus on Black. If the bond pulls us along, great. If not, it doesn't matter. The only one who needs to be there is her."

Val nodded, then turned to Black. It was hard to look her in the eyes, especially in her own domain. She carried herself like a predator, and some instinctual part of Val wanted to shy away from that. Black's presence resonated in the air around them, reminding Val every second that she was deep in Black's realm, in the heart of her power. She was only here at all because Black had allowed it, for the sake of her paladins.

"Are you ready?" Val asked.

Black nodded, bowing her head and butting it up against Val's half-raised hand. _**I am.**_

Heart pounding, Val wove her fingers into Black's fur, bringing up her other hand to frame Black's face. She leaned her forehead against Black's snout and breathed. She didn't bother to go back to the island; it felt so close it seemed she could have reached out her hand and touched the tower's walls, and the warm, wet air of Green's jungle puffed against the back of her neck.

And here, here in Black's Heart, the power resonated. This was the power Val needed to carry with her, and she wasn't going so far she needed Blue's Quintessence to augment her own.

She closed her eyes and thought of Sam. She didn't know him well enough yet to find him in all the universe, but she could find him when he was less than a mile away, and she clung to Black as she reached for Sam's spirit.

The cockpit resolved around them, dark and oppressive with Zarkon's overpowering presence. Val forgot how to breathe for a moment, and her fingers tightened in Black's fur until she managed to ground herself in the present. Sam stood nearby, as incorporeal as Val and Black, watching through the viewscreen as the battle raged.

He turned at their arrival, and flinched back from Black, flickering and reappearing against the far wall of the cockpit.

"It's fine!" Val cried. "She's a friend. Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

Sam pressed a hand to his chest, his eyes darting to Val for only an instant before returning to Black. "Val?"

"Yeah. It's me." She paused, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She didn't want to waste any time here, but it suddenly occurred to her that Sam had no idea what was happening. She should have thought about how to explain it to him. "This is Black," she said weakly.

 _ **I am the Black Lion, head of Voltron,**_  Black said, stepping forward. She seemed to shrink as she did so, perhaps in an attempt to appear less threatening.

Slowly, Sam uncurled and took a tentative step forward. "You're... a Voltron Lion? The one who chose Shiro."

_**I am, and I have something to ask of you--and something to offer you in return. We call it an adjunct bond.** _

"Adjunct bond?" Sam repeated. "What does that mean?"

 _ **A bond, between you and I, separate from but related to the paladin bonds I share with Shiro and Allura. The adjunct bond ties us all together, and grants the adjunct gifts with which to support their paladins.**_  Black paused with one paw in the air, her ears going back. _**At least, that's how it normally works. With you, it would look different. I would not ask as much of you as my sisters ask of their adjuncts...**_ She faltered as flashes of light from the battle lit up the cockpit, a laser blast rocking them all, though Val hardly noticed the motion. _**Time is short,**_ Black said, frustration rumbling in her chest. _ **I do not like asking you to make this decision blindly.**_

For a long moment, Sam was quiet, regarding Black with a furrowed brow and wariness etched into every line of his body.

He took another step forward, one hand hovering in front of his chest. "It would help Shiro, though. That's the long and short of it--right?"

 _ **We mean it to help**_ **you** _ **.**_ Black paused, and Val felt her satisfaction pool in the air as Sam still waited. _**But yes, it would also help Shiro.**_

Sam nodded at once, and squared his shoulders. "That's all I need to know."

* * *

Shiro didn't feel it while Val and Black left, but he felt it when they returned. His mind, which had been stretched between the Heart, the battle, and whatever was happening with Black herself, suddenly slid back into focus.

Shiro blinked, and found himself back in the cockpit of the Black Lion, his hands resting limp on her controls. Allura knelt on the floor behind him, and the minds of the other paladins swirled around them, Lance holding the bond together along with Meri and Nyma. Pidge perked up as Val returned, Black rumbled in satisfaction, and suddenly they all realized it was over.

"Did it work?" Matt asked, anticipation closing around his throat and strangling his voice.

The question carried through the bond just the same, and Shiro silently passed it on to Black, whose pleasure twined around him like a warm current.

"I... I think it did," Shiro said. He reached out, searching for the new bond, searching for _Sam_ , though he knew the other adjuncts were all far more aware of their paladins than the paladins were of the adjuncts. That was the nature of the bond, but Black had said that this one would be different.

A burst of light drew the paladins' attention back to the battle. A laser struck Voltron dead in the chest, and they reeled back, then quickly righted themself. But two more lasers were close on the first one's tail, striking Voltron's chest and splashing across Black's viewscreen.

On the third repetition, Keith's irritation flared, catching on the others' minds and spreading like wildfire.

"Oh, come on!" Pidge cried, hammering on their instrument panel to try to get the shield in place before Dark Voltron could attack again.

Amusement spread through the bond. The paladins traced it back to the Black Lion--but it took a moment to realize that it was actually coming from _the Black Lion_ , and not from one of her paladins.

 _Black?_ Allura asked, too busy trying to bring the team back into sync to put any more words to her question.

 _ **He is scared.**_ Black's words didn't reach the other paladins, but they filtered through Shiro and Allura's consciousness and translated as an approximation. 

"Zarkon?" Shiro asked. "Why?"

He got the impression that Black was smiling. _**He sensed me, when I came for Sam, and he doesn't know what it means. He thinks I came for**_ **him.**

Pidge finally got the shield in place, and the next attack splashed harmlessly on its surface. That crucial moment proved all the more time they needed to gather themselves, and they took off, cleanly dodging Zarkon's next attack.

Now that they were clear, they could see the desperation in Dark Voltron's motions. It kept its distance, firing a steady stream of lasers, and it made no move to close the distance to attack with its sword. One by one, the paladins began to smile. Keith raised Red's sword. Shay and Lance readied themselves to move. Pidge quirked an eyebrow, and Shiro gave the order.

They moved in unison, almost gleeful as they pressed the advantage. Zarkon fought like a cornered animal. His blocks were sloppy, when they came at all, and he couldn't stay far enough ahead of them to stay continuously out of reach. He fired on them endlessly, as though if he just threw enough at them, he could destroy them utterly.

The urge to laugh bubbled up in all of them, but it was Lance who let it loose, cackling as he pivoted them, twisting under a stream of lasers and leaving the reds an opening to thrust toward Dark Voltron's chest. The tip of Red's sword pierced the armor there, and Dark Voltron reacted like a panicked beast, flailing away and unleashing with every weapon it had.

Zarkon was on the edge of breaking.

It was magnificent, really. None of them had ever seen Zarkon like this; none except Allura, and her not since Zarkon was a boy. He was panicking, on the verge of fleeing. They just needed to push him a little further.

An idea struck Val a moment later, and she smiled, diving into the Heart even as her idea spread to all the rest of them. They couldn't sense her clearly when she was so deep, but Shiro and Allura felt it when Black followed her under, and when they pulled away, manifesting directly inside Zarkon's cockpit. It was a strange feeling, the bond pulling like that. They were all still linked, only not, and Shiro and Allura--still in the physical realm as they were--didn't completely lose track of themselves this time, though the controls of the Black Lion felt a little less substantial under their hands. Was this how the others had felt before? It was nearly impossible to focus.

It lasted only a moment. Val and Black went to Zarkon, Dark Voltron wavered, and then it turned and fled.

Pidge whooped in delight, already tilting to give chase, and Meri shouted in triumph when a wormhole suddenly burst alight.

In an instant, Val and Black returned, and Val frowned. "What's he doing? Doesn't he know he can't wormhole in here?"

"Sure he can," Meri said, a grin pulling at her lips. "It just won't go where he wants it to go."

"Right now, I don't think he cares," Allura said. "He just wants to get away."

They hesitated only a moment, then chased Dark Voltron into the wormhole, which rippled with streaks of silver light. Nyma checked their coordinates when they spilled out the other side, and sure enough, they were back on the edge of the Shenva Quadrant, out past the edge of the defensive zone.

Zarkon had already opened another wormhole and plunged inside, and this time the paladins weren't quite fast enough to follow.

Disappointment thudded through them all, but there was almost as much relief, and anticipation sharp and strong from Matt and Pidge. They hadn't stopped Dark Voltron for good; they hadn't saved any of its pilots. But they had saved the people of Alshere, and Black had forged a bond with Sam.

For today, that was more than enough.

* * *

"You're sure it worked?"

Shiro turned as Pidge approached, Karen close behind. They'd returned to the castle-ship shortly after Zarkon fled, Shiro and Allura hastening to report back to the Coalition with the good news. ( _Anything_ to combat the fear and doubt that threatened to consume their precarious allies.) Pidge entered the bridge so soon after Allura ended the call that Shiro was sure they'd been waiting outside, probably only held back by Karen.

Allura smiled at Shiro, then withdrew with Coran to the other side of the bridge, leaving Shiro and the Holts in relative privacy.

Half the Holts, at any rate. Where were Matt and Keith? Surely they had questions, too--surely _Matt_ was dying to know what had happened, at least. Shiro wondered, briefly, whether it had anything to do with Red. They'd been subdued in the Voltron formation, and all three had remained silent on the way back to the castle.

Shiro would need to track them down, later.

For now he smiled, crossing his arms over his chest. "Black says it worked."

"Have you noticed anything?" Pidge asked. "Can you... I don't know... sense him?"

Shiro shook his head. "Sorry, no."

"You wouldn't, though, would you?" Karen asked. "That's not how it works."

Shiro pursed his lips. "What about you? Shouldn't you know what happened?"

"I do, and I know it worked." She laughed, running her fingers through her hair. "I guess I just wanted confirmation. It feels like wishful thinking."

"I can understand that," he said, heaving a sigh. "But if Black says it worked, I trust her. I just wish I knew what it _does._ "

At that very moment, a wave of vertigo bowled Shiro over, needles prickling all across his scalp. He reached out for the chair nearest him to keep from toppling and saw Pidge and Karen make a dive for him. They were calling his name, but he hardly heard them any more than he heard Coran calling for Allura.

_Shiro?_

Sam's voice reverberated in his head, chasing away the vertigo like a staticy radio call that suddenly became clear. He seemed almost as surprised as Shiro.

"Sam?" Shiro clutched his head, and his eyes fell on Pidge, who had just frozen, their hands turning to vices on his arm.

 _What is this?_ Allura asked, her voice in Shiro's head as clear as Sam's, and every bit as as confused. _How are you doing this?_

_I... don't know. I don't even know what's happening. Is this a dream?  
_

Black purred suddenly, entirely too pleased with herself, and entirely too close, as though the adjunct bond had drawn her in.

 _ **Communication,**_ Black said. _**That is my domain, and it is what I have to offer you. If ever you need us, you need only reach out, and we will hear you.**_

Sam was quiet for a time, and then he breathed something like a sigh. _Well. That's quite the trick._

Shiro closed his eyes, trying not to burst into tears. _It is._ _Sam... It's good to hear your voice._

 _Yours, too._ Sam's voice was soft and teary, and Shiro couldn't help but laugh as he reached up to wipe his own tears away. He saw Pidge and Karen there, and he pulled Pidge into a hug.

"It worked," he whispered to them, blinking furiously as they clutched at his wrists. "Your dad's my adjunct."

Now all they had to do was bring him home.


	27. The Klenahn Cannon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last Time... The paladins faced off against Dark Voltron, complete with Zarkon's new and improved Dark Red. Red was agitated all through the fight, but it wasn't until Dark Red attacked that they realized what was wrong: Keturah used Red's stolen essence to create the new Dark Red. Keith and Matt were ready to destroy it, but Shiro reigned them in, directing the team to form Voltron so Val could project with Black to Sam Holt, making him the black adjunct.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Anxiety throughout Hunk's second POV scene, including a brief panic attack.

"I'm worried about Red," Keith said, stopping in the middle of the hangar floor and glancing over his shoulder. He and Matt had left immediately--Matt, at least, was eager to find Shiro and ask after his father--but Red hadn't followed. "I think that run-in with Dark Red really messed them up."

Matt's face scrunched up with a complicated series of emotions. Eventually, though, he heaved a sigh and came back to where Keith stood. "You're right. That was..."

"Yeah," Keith said. They didn't need to put it into words. They'd both been there, linked to Red in the cockpit of the lion, in the middle of battle, when the pain and rage tore through her. It had left Keith gutted, and Red had deliberately pulled away once they'd formed Voltron.

They found Red still standing in the center of the cockpit, one hand on either chair with a white-knuckle grip. Their head was bowed, their back to the ramp, but even from here, Keith could tell they were shaking.

"Red?" Keith asked.

They stiffened, hands gripping the seat backs so tightly Keith thought they might actually tear holes straight through the fabric. Keith stopped short, his chest growing tight.

Matt moved before Keith could gather himself. He crossed to Red's side and put a hand on their shoulder. "Hey."

Red opened their eyes, watching Matt warily. "Sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you."

Matt rolled his eyes. "You didn't 'disturb' anything. You're hurting, and we wanted to see if you're okay."

"I'll be fine. Go find Shiro. I know you want to."

Matt pursed his lips, and Keith finally ventured forward, crossing his arms as he squeezed in beside Matt.

"Shiro can wait," Keith said. "You're--" Keith shook his head. He didn't have words for what Keturah had done to Red, but even just thinking about it, Keith felt sick. "It's fucked up, what she did."

"It's also not your problem," Red said. "Look, I appreciate the concern, but really. I'm fine. Just--go."

Matt scowled. "Okay, both of you have always been dense, I know, but this is taking it to a new extreme." Red's head snapped up, their eyes wide as they stared at him.

Truth be told, Keith couldn't help staring a little, either. This was the first time Matt had ever acknowledged Red and Akira together like that, and it was strange to hear it now, tinged with exasperation and a little bit of affection and none of the festering hurt and betrayal that had always been there before.

"We were inside your head during that battle, Red," Matt said in a softer voice, scratching the back of his neck. "Okay? We felt how hurt and pissed off you were--and for good reason. So don't go saying you're 'fine' when you're clearly not."

Red opened their mouth, then shut it again, taking a step back. Their hands slid of the seat-backs and fell to their sides, where their fingers twitched in search of something to keep them busy. "You don't get it."

"I _just_ said--"

"That wasn't me." Red looked up, their face scrunched with pain, all their alien features on full display in the dim cockpit. The gold of their eyes glowed like lanterns; the red markings on their skin glimmered like stars. "What you felt," they continued in a whisper. "That hurt, that anger. It wasn't mine.... I think it was Akira's."

Keith felt like he'd just taken a blow from a level ten gladiator, all the breath leaving him in a rush. Beside him, Matt took a step forward. Shock had turned his face to stone, but he searched Red with his eyes. "Akira?" he whispered. "You're sure?"

Red nodded. "I haven't felt anything like that from him since we fused. Little things, here and there. Emotions that felt like mine but which must have come from him. Not..." Their face crumpled, eyes squeezing shut as they took another step back and shook their head. They wrapped their arms around their gut like they were going to be sick. "Why does he still care about me like that? After _everything_ I've taken from him--he should hate me."

"It's not that simple," Matt said. He hesitated, then closed the distance between them and put a hand on Red's shoulder. "Sometimes we hate the people closest to us because we're hurting, and it's easier to be angry than to face the pain. Sometimes even that hurt and that hate isn't enough to make you stop loving someone, because deep down you know none of this is their fault. Because you can see that they're hurting, too."

Red teared up at that, and Matt pulled them into an embrace.

"I'm sorry, Red," he whispered, his voice shaking. "I should have realized you were hurting sooner."

They shook their head, weakly returning his embrace. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"It does, and I'm sorry."

Heart in his throat, Keith moved forward and awkwardly joined the hug, one arm around Red, the other hand on Matt's back.

Red was shaking like a leaf, but they kept their head down until it passed and they could step back with a neutral look on their face. "Thank you," they said. "But really, I'm fine. Stop worrying about me and... go on."

* * *

"Thank you again for your hospitality," Keena said, setting her bag down just inside the door.

Jexxel waved her off, mandibles clicking in a way that said he was pleased to be of service. (Pleased to have Keena indebted to him, more likely. The man was a minor political figure here on Azhareia who had made his career by trading in favors. It had made him an easy way in to the Zharei political sphere, but dealing with him once she'd had more sound footing had become something of an annoyance.)

Unfortunately, she didn't have much choice now. Karen Holt had chased her off the Castle of Lions and ensured that she couldn't go back to New Altea. She was adrift, her network cut down to the desperate and the opportunistic--for now. Jexxel wasn't the only one who'd offered Keena lodging while she rebuilt, but Azhareia was large, centrally located, and filled to the brim with the kinds of technical and cultural commodities Keena needed to shore up relations with the more skittish of her former allies.

"You'll let me know if there's anything else I can do for you, won't you?" Jexxel said, wringing his hands and bobbing his head. "After the paladins' treachery, I'm sure you're in need of some true friends. Perhaps you could dine with my partners and I. I assure you, we would love the company."

"Some other time, perhaps," Keena said. "I've been on the move for quite a while now, and quite honestly, all I want is to get some rest."

"Of course, of course. You have my contact. Ping me if you need anything."

"I will," Keena said, guiding Jexxel toward the door with the angle of her body. "And thank you again, from the bottom of my heart."

Her smile soured the moment the door closed behind him, and she bared her teeth at the door before sighing and taking her bag into the bedroom. It was a small apartment she'd been offered, but it was free, and it was private, and she'd made do with less than that when she was still in the field.

She would set up shop in the bedroom. Hopefully if Jexxel tried to make himself a regular fixture around here, he would stay to the front room, which had come furnished with a sofa, a small table with two chairs, and a tiny corner kitchen with only the very basics. It wasn't much for entertaining guests, so she would have to scope out the city, see if she couldn't find a nice cafe or concert space where she might take potential allies for a casual afternoon and some preliminary talks. Assuming she could get anyone to come to her.

More often, she was going to be going to these people, or contacting them on a secure comms channel. She already had her ship--refitted with new nav cores and thoroughly searched for any trackers the paladins may have thought to place before she left.

She'd found none, which either meant they were stupider than she'd assumed, or far more clever. Why wouldn't they track her, after all the trouble they'd gone to to chase her off their ship? But Keena had experience with this sort of thing, and she trusted her ability to spot a tracking device. There was nothing foreign anywhere in or on her ship, and with the nav cores swapped out, there shouldn't be anything in the programming, either.

Her first priority, then, was setting up her comms station. The bed took up most of the small bedroom, but by shoving it into the corner she managed to clear up a little more space--enough for a chair and a comms kit she'd rigged herself to have all the security she needed. It took the better part of an hour to get it running, and by the end she was as tired as she'd claimed to be--but she hadn't declined Jexxel's offer of dinner so she could rest.

She'd spent the last two weeks racing from world to work, meeting with anyone who would see her. She'd lost more than half her budding alliance, first because of the collapse of her network of agents, then because of the rapidly spreading rumors of her removal from office. Many people she'd once considered staunch supporters now refused to see her. Some went so far as to bar her entry into their airspace.

She'd salvaged what she could while working out of a one-man shuttle. Convinced seven worlds to throw their full support behind her, though not openly. Not yet. Kolivan and the paladins might recognize what she was trying to do, but they wouldn't be able to prove anything, nor would they be able to stop it. Several other worlds were at least still open to talks, though they weren't ready to withdraw from the Coalition just yet.

That was fine. Keena had other plans in the works. She needed to do a little more preparation, set up a more permanent base of operations here to stabilize the connections still open to her, and then she would be ready.

It was almost time to begin.

* * *

Somehow, Nyma and Red had fallen into a rhythm.

What had started as a string of awkward conversations--confrontations, maybe--had turned into something more. Long, meandering conversations in Red's cockpit. Chance encounters in the bowels of the castle. (Totally accidental. Yes. Nyma believed that, one hundred percent.) Dinner at midnight, because after all, Red was human now. She _did_ need to eat, whatever the other paladins thought.

Nyma had started off looking for answers. She'd committed to finding a way to help.

Now... Now she found herself seeking Red out not because she had questions, not because she wanted to help, but because Red had become a friend in her own right.

Nyma sought her out late the night after the battle with Dark Voltron, a platter full of assorted leftovers hovering at her shoulder. The Red Lion’s head was already down in anticipation of her arrival, mouth open and ramp extended. Nyma knocked as she entered, ducking her head. "Hey. You hungry?"

Red grunted, indistinct, and Nyma frowned, abandoning all pretense and striding into the cockpit. Red was sprawled across Matt's chair, feet hooked over the arm closer to Nyma, head dipped out of sight the other direction.

It had been a while since Nyma had found her like this, over-dramatically morose and trying too hard to seem like she didn't want the company.

Nyma was immune to her antics by now. Tapping the bottom of the platter so it hovered in place, Nyma stalked over to Red, swept her feet off the arm of the chair, and perched on the arm in their place. "What happened?"

Red lifted her head, glaring down her nose at Nyma. "Nothing happened. Who says anything happened?"

Nyma arched an eyebrow, but if Red wanted to be like this, Nyma wasn't going to stop her. She snapped her fingers, and the platter zoomed over to her side. She contemplated the selection--some bread, some pasta, a single bowl of soup--before selecting one of several tiny meat pies.

Red was upright in an instant, shoving Nyma's hand away and grabbing a breadstick from the center of the pile.

"Done sulking?" Nyma asked with a crooked smile.

Red elbowed her in the ribs. "I'm not _sulking._ I'm... thinking."

Nyma turned, frowning. That wasn't Red's sulking voice. It wasn't the tone she used when she was being deliberately melodramatic. She actually seemed subdued, pensive, and Nyma didn't like it.

"Hey," she said, dusting off the crumbs her pie had left behind. "You know I'm not here to pry, but I _was_ there today. I know that what Keturah did to you was fucked up, and I know it bothered you--for good reason."

"It doesn't matter," Red said. Nyma only quirked an eyebrow, and Red bristled. "Fuck you, Nyma. Keturah's a terrible person, and I regret every second I spent with her, but all of that is over now. She's gone. I cut her out of my life. I'm not going to dwell on that, and I don't need you harping on it, either."

Nyma held up her hands. "No harping." She grabbed a can of soda from the platter and popped the top. "What were you thinking about, then?"

Red made a face at her breadstick, then dropped it back onto the platter and flopped back over the arm of the chair. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

Nyma frowned, but she didn't push. Red was too much like her for that. It would do her no good, and it would undo whatever progress they'd made in the last few weeks. She did watch Red, though, and she wondered. Usually when Red got like this, it meant she and Matt were butting heads again, but as far as Nyma could tell, Matt's grudge had mostly cooled.

Patience. That was the advice Rolo had offered her, and that was all she had to offer to Red.

She twisted, throwing her legs across Red's lap, and pulled the platter over, spinning it with one finger until a pile of gelatinous blobs were facing Red. "Hey. Coran made your favorite."

Red lifted her head, interested despite her efforts to hide it, and finally sat up again, pinching one of the blobs between her thumb and forefinger and popping it in her mouth. A smile tugged at her lips, and she relaxed back in her chair, her shoulder brushing Nyma's.

"Hey," she said, grabbing the next blob and rolling it between her fingers. She lifted her head and flashed a smile at Nyma. "Thanks for doing this."

Nyma laughed. "Doing what? Bringing you junk food and leftovers?"

Red's shoulder jumped in a shrug. "That, and whatever. Just being here in general. It's been... nice. Having a friend."

The melancholy in her voice made something in Nyma's chest twinge, and she struggled to return Red's smile. "You don't need to thank me for that."

"I know." She paused, like she wanted to say something more, then shook her head, tossed back the second blob, and let her head drop onto Nyma's shoulder. "I'm glad I picked you. You're going to be good for them. Just as long as you remember not to let them get under your skin." She tipped her head back, a smile crinkling the corner of her eyes. "They're good at that."

Nyma snorted. "I think they get that from you."

Red's gaze grew distant, her smile turning soft. "Maybe they do... I guess that means I don't have anything to worry about, huh?"

"Red, you're being weird."

"Am I?" Red shook herself. "Sorry about that. It's that sort of a night. Maybe we should do something. Get my mind off things."

"Sure," Nyma said, unease pulling at her chest. "Whatever you need."

* * *

The team met the next day, for a rather belated strategy meeting. At least, Hunk assumed it had been pushed back. Something like this had been scheduled for just a day or two after the disastrous Klenahn mission: an all-team meeting to review the current state of the war, their next steps, and ideas for dealing with the major threats.

Then half the team had wound up in cryopods, and Shiro and Allura had sent Hunk and Shay to the Balmera for a week of recuperation, and today was the first time since Klenahn that they'd all been on the castle, with no one out of commission and no recent or upcoming battle draining their focus away from the big picture.

"All right," Shiro said once they'd all settled themselves around the table. "I'm not going to waste any time. We've got a number of threats that we need to figure out how to deal with, some of them soon." He tapped the tabletop before him and a square lit up, like a small embedded display screen. A few swipes of his fingers, and similar displays appeared before the other paladins, their adjuncts, Thace, and Layeni, who had all gathered for this meeting. Even Red was here, though they sat against the wall, out of the way, listening but not participating.

A list was displayed on the screen, detailing the issues that needed addressing. Scanning down it, Hunk wasn't surprised by any of them, although he did find it a little depressing. They'd come so far in this war, but looking at this list, they'd hardly made a dent. Not in any of the really big issues.

_Vkullor (track, divert, destroy)_   
_Dark Voltron_   
_Robeast Labs_   
_Coalition_   
_Keena_

"The Coalition's kind of obvious," Lance said, bowing over the list with a hand in his hair. "Right? It's the other four issues that are causing all these worlds to freak out and leave, so the ultimate solution is to solve the other issues. Until then, we really don't have any choice but to keep doing what we're doing--damage control and all that."

Shiro grimaced, and Allura gave him a sympathetic look. "Unfortunately, it does seem that way. That doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it, just in case we're able to come up with something more substantial we can do in the short-term."

"I'm looking into the robeast labs already," Pidge said. "I've got all sorts of Imperial records to go through, and we're pulling more every chance we get. Unfortunately, I haven't had any luck yet. A few mentions of Project Robeast, but most of them are careful not to mention locations. I'm not sure how many people outside the labs even _know_ what's going on, much less where."

"The Accords are looking into it as well," Thace said. "I've spoken with Kolivan. The robeast labs and the location where they're holding the pilots of Dark Voltron are the problems New Altea's network is best positioned to help with. We'll hear as soon as they have anything to report."

"And we have Sam now, too," Shiro said. "He's still learning how to use the adjunct bond, so communication with him isn't reliable right now, but between his telepathy and Val's bilocation, we're getting there. It's possible that something he's seen or heard will be able to point us in the right direction."

"Keena and the Vkullor are the biggest issues," Keith said, his voice sharp-edged and his eyes riveted on the list. (Probably so that he didn't need to look at anyone else, Hunk figured.) Matt glanced at him sidelong, his hands folded in front of his mouth. "We have no information on either of them, no way to track their movements... No way to stop them."

"Keena would be pretty easy to stop if we _could_ find her," Matt muttered. "Unlike the Vkullor, she's not unkillable."

No one said anything to that. Hunk wasn't exactly keen on the idea of murdering her... but at the same time, if that ended up being the only way to stop her, he wouldn't shed any tears. He doubted he was alone in the sentiment, either.

"Here's the thing," Meri said, tapping her finger on the list before her. She looked around the table, catching every eye. "Keena and the robeasts we can deal with once we find them. We've basically made a career of smashing robeasts, and whether we kill Keena or arrest her, Matt's right. She's just one person, and if we remove her from the equation, all of her schemes would lose momentum. Maybe they wouldn't stop overnight, but they'd become a lot more manageable. Dark Voltron isn't that much more difficult. We can hold our own against it in a fight, and if we could find their base, we could launch a rescue mission."

Nyma nodded. "Ultimately, all three of three of those issues are only on this list because we don't have a lead. Once we find something, or the Accords do, or Sam does, or whoever, we can sit down, plan a normal mission--one with higher stakes than usual, maybe, but still. None of these issues is really all that much worse than our usual fare."

"Just the Vkullor," Val finished.

Meri nodded at them both. "We need to keep searching for Keena and the labs, but otherwise our focus _needs_ to be on the Vkullor. How to track it, how to kill it... If it turned up on our doorstep tomorrow, we'd have nothing. A few desperate ideas, yes," she amended, rolling her hand in Pidge's direction as they opened their mouth. "We might get lucky and escape alive. If the universe drops a miracle in our lap, we might even kill it. I don't want to have to count on the good will of the universe at large."

"I don't think any of us wants that," Layeni said. "So where are we at on a feasible plan?"

"Hunk, Matt, Val and I are tossing around ideas on how to track it," Pidge said. "It's supposed to be impossible, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet."

"If we could track it, it would lose a lot of its power," Matt agreed.

Shiro nodded. "If we have advanced warning, and a reasonable chance of diverting it away from any target, it'll stop being such an issue with the Coalition."

"We can't divert it forever," Karen said. "We still need a way to kill it, and none of us are any closer to figuring it out."

"Pidge and I have scanners all ready to go," Coran said. "The next time we encounter it, we can scan for Quintessence sacs. See if we can't start whittling down its stores."

"I want to get a good look down its gullet, too," Matt said. "I still say destroying whatever organ generates those gravity blasts is the way to go. That's at _least_ half its destructive potential."

"And, what, you're going to fly into its mouth to take the shot?" Lance asked. "No way!"

Hunk watched this all with growing bafflement. "Uh... Guys?" he asked before Matt could get too indignant. "What about Klenahn?"

The rest of the team stared at him like he'd just sprouted a tail, dead silence falling over the room. Meri was the first to recover, leaning forward onto her crossed arms. "I'm sorry, did you miss the part where half the team almost _died_? The planet is a death trap--and not the kind we were hoping for."

"But it is." Hunk pinched the bridge of his nose. "There was something in that cavern. A machine of some sort."

Allura shook her head. "The Klenna were a highly advanced people by the end. Everything we've managed to pull from the devices we recovered--which, admittedly, wasn’t as much as we’d hoped--points to an extremely high level of industrialization. Maybe it was a mine of some sort."

"It wasn't a mine," Shay said, sharp. "There were no tools there for excavations, no means of transporting anything out of there except the workers. They dug down to the cavern, and then they stopped."

"And they _built,_ " Hunk added. "That entire place was one gigantic, city-sized machine. It looked like the inside of a Weblum--like the diagrams in the castle's archives? The radiation Pidge and Val were tracking was especially concentrated near that cavern--focused, too, like it was escaping through a vent." He looked around. "I think the Klenna designed that cavern to store whatever energy is causing that radiation--to amplify it and then, if the need arises--to fire it."

Shiro sat up straight, his eyes boring in to Hunk's head. "You think that cavern is the weapon we're looking for?"

Hunk wet his lips, knowing that Shiro was asking more than what he said. _Are you willing to go back? Are you really okay with that?_

"A city-sized machine inside the mountain range local legend links to dead Vkullor?" Hunk breathed in, then nodded. "I think we have to check it out."

* * *

Matt dragged his feet through preparations for the mission. If Hunk said there was something to find, there was something to find. Matt trusted him that much--but that didn't mean he was eager to go back to Klenahn. He'd almost died here. (More importantly, half the rest of the team had almost died here, and none of _them_ had made the mistake of starting a fire in an explosive atmosphere.)

They would be more careful this time. No explosives, no open flame. Pidge, Hunk, and Matt would all check over any equipment they found in case of booby traps. With everyone there together, all of them on alert, and the Guard ready to mount a rescue the second they or any of the adjuncts noticed trouble, things would be fine.

They would be.

It was just... distaste that had Matt lagging behind the other paladins.

All that dragging his feet meant that he saw his mother walk into the prep room, dressed in a standard-issue Altean armored suit, slimmer and a little less sturdy than paladin armor, but easier to move in. She'd pinned her hair back and carried her helmet under her arm, and she stopped when she saw Matt still standing there.

Her eyes widened, and then she drew her courtroom mask across her face. "Oh, good. You're still here."

"Mom?" Matt crossed his arms. "You're not thinking of coming with us."

"Of course I am."

Matt arched an eyebrow.

For a moment, Karen looked like she was going to go on stonewalling him, but after only a moment she relented, taking another step forward and breathing deeply. "Sooner or later, we're going to find where they're holding your dad, and you and Pidge are going to go in there, fight your way to him, bring him home."

Frowning, Matt shook his head. "Of course we are. What's that got to do with anything?"

"I'm going to be coming with you," Karen said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"I'm sorry, _what?_ "

"We're going to bring your father home. Together. I've been training with Thace, and he agreed that I'm ready to start going out in the field, at least on missions that don't involve much risk of combat."

"So you thought you'd start with the planet that almost killed nine people?"

Karen tipped her head. "Six people, at worst. Pidge, Keith, and Val didn't even need pods after that."

Matt made an incredulous sound. "Like that makes it any better? _Mom._ "

"You were unprepared last time. Didn't know the half of what you were getting into. Now we're in a better position, and we're focused on one location--one that, by all accounts, the Empire had no hand in."

"We have no proof of that."

"It's a reasonable assumption, if there's anything there to find at all. If it's half the weapon it's supposed to be, Zarkon never would have abandoned that planet. Razed it, yes, but then he would have come back, reclaimed everything he could."

Matt rubbed his forehead. "I'm not going to change your mind, am I?"

Karen offered him a tight smile. "I'm afraid not."

He sighed, threw his hands up, and shoved his helmet over his ears. "All right. But you're the one who's gonna have to convince Shiro and Allura."

* * *

The ride down into the cave was way longer than Hunk remembered, and he remembered it taking freaking _forever._ The elevator platform was fairly large and probably could have held twenty or thirty people no problem, but it felt uncomfortably tight with even just fifteen of them--eleven paladins, Karen, Thace, and two Guard pilots. Thace and the Guard were staying near the elevator as first responders. This area didn't look to have been damaged at all during the cave-in, so anyone here should be safe, and they wouldn't need to wait for the elevator like the two Guard squads positioned up in the tunnel above and outside in the Klenna camp.

Not that anyone was going to _have_ to help. The cave-in last time hadn't just _happened_ , right at the same time as the blues triggered the Imperial trap in the city. They must have been linked somehow, so as long as they didn't trigger any Quintessence-draining booby-traps, they would be fine.

It would be fine.

It would be _more_ fine if he wasn't stuck on this elevator platform in deep darkness punctuated by more than a dozen narrow beams of light, which flickered this way and that as the others turned and shifted and conversed in low tones to pass the time. Blank stone crawled by in those beams of light, interspersed occasionally by veins of ore and patches of small crystals that flashed in the light.

Hunk closed his eyes, counting his breaths as the seconds ticked by. He honestly hadn't expected it to be so hard to come back here, which maybe was his own fault. It had been hard enough to come down here the first time; why the hell would it be any easier after almost dying?

"Hey, man. You doing okay?"

Hunk cracked an eye open to find Lance standing at his shoulder, arms crossed and head tipped toward Hunk. He'd opened a private comm channel so the others wouldn't be able to overhear.

Hunk lifted his shoulders in a jerky shrug. "I'm fine."

"You're not," Lance said, jostling Hunk with his shoulder. "And that's okay. You're not alone this time. It's gonna be fine."

Hunk averted his eyes, watching the rock roll by before him. "That's what I keep telling myself," he said, trying to keep his voice light. "I'll be fine once we're moving. It's just standing around like this, there's nothing else to distract myself with."

"I get that," Lance said. He hummed drumming his fingers on his arm. "So what sort of machine do you think it is down there?"

Hunk's shoulder barely twitched this time. "Something that needs a lot of power. Pretty sure that entire cavern is covered with some sort of, like, solar panels, but for Quintessence, or radiation, or whatever. Absorbing whatever energy is in the area. Storing it. Like I said, it reminded me of a Weblum."

"You think it shoots a laser into space?" Lance clasped his hands together and mimed shooting a pistol toward the sky.

Hunk cracked a smile at that. "I dunno. Maybe not a laser, but _something_. Hopefully something powerful enough to kill a Vkullor."

The stone wall suddenly disappeared, a deep, impenetrable darkness swelling before them, and Hunk's stomach dropped. Lance tapped his fist on Hunk's shoulder. "Here's hoping."

All around them, the paladins started to come to attention, arms dropping to their sides, headlamps swinging around toward the yawning darkness. Hunk and Lance switched back to the open frequency.

"All right, everyone," Shiro said. "Fan out. Pairs are trios are okay, just make sure you stay within sight of the people on either side of you."

"We're going to take this slow," Allura added. "Start by getting some lights set up so we have a better view of this place."

Hunk reached down to the fist-sized lights hanging from his belt. Coran had given each of them half a dozen of these bulbs. They were small but powerful, capable of sticking to any surface or floating in midair. Allura placed the first one, some hundred feet into the wide, narrow tunnel that led from the elevator to the main chamber, reaching up to fix the globe against the ceiling. She tapped the side, and it burst alight, an eerie bluish light washing across the tunnel. As bright as it was, it still didn't quite chase away the gloom at the very edges of the tunnel, but it illuminated the broad shape of the space, making it that much less imposing.

The tightness in Hunk's chest loosened as he looked around him. It wasn't as big a space as it had seemed last time he was here--large, yes, about as wide as a major road back on Earth, but it had felt twice that when everything was dark and empty.

It was another story entirely when they reached the main chamber. Lance tossed a light orb as high as he could. It glowed like a tiny sun, bright enough for its rays to reach the nearest walls and even a small patch of the ceiling.

Just a short distance into the cavern, though, the ceiling soared higher still, disappearing once more into darkness. That same darkness swallowed the light dead ahead, with no signs of any structures or other features to break up the cavernous space.

What it _did_ illuminate was the destruction left over by the cave-in. Obviously man-made panels covered the walls, but many of them had fallen off, leaving pale bare rock visible in a patchwork pattern. Heaping mounds of stone, metal, and crystal littered the floor, turning it into a treacherous obstacle course of loose stone and precariously balanced machinery.

And Hunk and Shay had been trapped in there.

All at once, the corners of Hunk's vision went dark, the pitch of the cavern creeping in, reclaiming land taken by the Altean lights, and his chest grew tight. It was the same sensation as being pinned, too much pressure for his rib cage to expand, his lungs laboring to draw in breath.

Suddenly Meri was at his side, her hand squeezing his wrist. "Hey," she said. "Breathe with me."

Hunk shook his head, shame burning up his neck while cold fear tingled in the palms of his hands. "It's nothing," he gasped. "I'm fine, I--"

Another pair of hands, settling on his shoulders. There was surprising weight there, for just being hands, like Lance was trying to hold him down to the ground. He pivoted Hunk in place so they were looking at each other, Lance's face was lit up blue with the light inside his helmet, his dark eyes fixed on Hunk. He leaned forward, tapping their helmets together.

"Give it a minute," Lance said. "Okay?"

"We're not in any hurry." Meri still stood beside him, one hand around his wrist, the other resting on his back. He only felt it as a slight resistance when he tried to turn toward her voice; with as thick as his armor was there, he couldn't feel the warmth or weight of her hand on its own.

A song swirled inside him, as calming as Meri's hand around his wrist, Lance's steady gaze on his. He turned and found Shay standing a few feet away, watching him with sad eyes. She was tense, but calm enough. Not like Hunk. She wasn't falling apart just _being_ here, when it was Hunk's entire idea in the first place.

"Stop that," Meri said.

Hunk's eyes flicked her way. "Stop what?"

"Comparing yourself. It's not a competition."

That wasn't-- Hunk shook his head, though he didn't have the words right now to say what he wanted to. That he wasn't competing with anyone. That he should have been better than he was. That he shouldn't have been so adamant that they come here if he wasn't ready to face--what? A bunch of rocks? The comms were working fine here, the cavern quiet as could be. The machine had switched itself off sometime since they'd last been here, and the cave itself seemed to have stabilized.

(Seemed to have. That was the kicker. Because everything had _seemed_ stable last time, too, right up until it started crashing down on both their heads. What happened now if the cavern collapsed while they were on the other side? With an entire city's worth of rubble between them and help, an entire mountain keeping the Lions at bay, what hope would any of them have?)

Lance and Meri guided him somewhere--it was hard to focus on where--and helped him to sit with his back against a stone slab, his head dropped between his knees. It was low, wherever it was, and Hunk couldn't see any of the other paladins, though he could see changes in the shadows as they sent up more lights from time to time.

They said nothing as they sat with him--just, sat. Meri rubbed his back, Lance leaned his head on Hunk's shoulder, and somewhere out of sight, Shay sang sympathy and comfort.

Slowly, Hunk's breathing calmed. The shaking in his hand quieted. He managed to sit up without his stomach turning inside out. Lance offered him a smile.

"How you doing?"

Hunk snorted. "I had a panic attack five feet into this place."

"And you're still here," Meri said. "That's not nothing. You want to take a little more time before we move on?"

Hunk shook his head. "If I'm gonna be here, I'm gonna be doing something worthwhile."

"Fair enough." Lance stood and offered Hunk a hand up. He took it gratefully, trying not to think about the way his knees were shaking. He swore he could _smell_ the atmosphere here. The earthen musk of the dust in the air, the acrid stench of chlorine gas, like bleach spilled all over the floor.

If he let himself think about it too long, he was going to have another panic attack, so he forced himself to move forward, deeper into the cavern. Three more lights had gone up in the time Hunk had been fighting with his anxiety, lighting a broad swath of the floor. The paladins had already spread out quite a bit--far enough that Hunk could only identify those who happened to be close enough to directly under a light that he could make out the color of their armor. Pidge and Karen had just sent up a light near the right hand wall; Keith was in the very center of the space, having just scaled a particularly large mound of fallen stone and machinery and launched another light from there.

"This place is _huge_ ," Matt said, awed. "I know we already knew that, but--just look at it. What kind of machine needs this much open space?"

Hunk turned toward the rest of the team and started walking. Just walking, to start. He scanned the cavern for a good target. Pidge already had one wall covered, and another pair was off by the far wall, though they were in too deep of shadows for Hunk to tell if it was Val and Nyma or Shiro and Allura. That would have been Hunk's first instinct, the walls. At least he knew some of the machine was still intact there. There were a few other shapes in the rubble like the one the reds had scaled, though, and each of them pulled at Hunk.

"Who says it's supposed to be empty?" Pidge asked, as though they'd read his mind. "We know there's been at least one cave-in. There could have been more over the last five hundred years... Who knows what's buried under all this rubble?"

A flash of yellow caught his eye, and he glanced down at the crevice Meri's headlamp had just passed over. The beam of his own headlamp found only rock for a long moment, but then it fell on a gap in the stone, a narrow opening to a larger cavity.

Hunk's own helmet lay just inside, cracked and dusty, the faceplate completely shattered and Shay's bloody handprint on one side.

Hunk froze, the tremors returning in full force as he stared at the helmet and the tiny space around it. It seemed impossible that he and Shay had been down there. That they'd _survived_ in such a small pocket. A foot in any direction, and they almost certainly would have died down here.

In a daze, he crouched down, worming his way back into the cavity to retrieve his helmet. It should have sparked another panic attack, when just walking into this cavern had been too much to handle, but he was beyond that now. Now, he was just numb, his mind a fuzz of static and his eyes riveted on the yellow of the helmet and the orangeish smear of Shay's blood, dried to a rusty brown.

"Hunk?" Lance called. "Something wrong?"

Hunk emerged clutching his helmet, and Lance's next question cut off with a strangled sound. Hunk couldn't drag his eyes away from the helmet.

"Shay pulled it off me," he said. "I forgot about that. It was shattered anyway, and the comms were busted, and... I was panicking." He looked up, then, and saw stark horror on Lance and Meri's face as they stared past Hunk at the cavity in the rubble.

"You were... in _there_?" Lance asked, his voice cracking on the last word.

Hunk followed his gaze. The way the light hit the rubble, all he could see was the massive slab that formed the roof--a machine panel from the wall or ceiling, Hunk guessed--a small patch of shallow floor, and deep shadows that hid the places where they'd been pinned.

(All the better. Hunk didn't know that he could have pointed out the specific piece of rubble that had almost crushed him, but he was absolutely certain that if he _had_ recognized it, it would have meant the end of this expedition.)

Suddenly Lance snatched the helmet from Hunk's hand and tossed it aside. Hunk opened his mouth to protest, but Lance flung his arms around Hunk's neck and pulled him into a crushing hug. "Holy fuck," Lance whispered. His voice, like the rest of him, was shaking--shaking more than Hunk, right now, and Hunk automatically moved to calm him before the irony of the situation dawned on him.

"I made it out," Hunk said. "That's what matters, right? Shay and I made it out."

"And then you came back," Meri said. She placed one hand on Hunk's back, the other on Lance's, and nodded solemnly to Hunk. "That's more than a lot of people could say."

Hunk straightened his spine, stepping up and out of the depression at the mouth of the cavity and pulling Lance up beside him. He turned toward the rest of the cavern, setting his jaw as he searched for his next target. "Now I just need to make sure it was worth it."

* * *

Pidge had resorted to taking pictures of everything they came across. _Lots_ of pictures. They wanted to find an entire panel--intact, if possible, and preferably lose--that they could take back to the castle-ship. Because there was only so much they could learn in here, in the dark, with minimal tools and limited time.

Hunk may have been right to compare this thing to a Weblum. Large swatches of wall were covered with panels of a strange metallic substance, polished smooth and surprisingly thin, that reminded Pidge of solar panels. They couldn't be sure what, exactly, it was absorbing, but if they had to hazard a guess, they would say Quintessence. It was remarkably concentrated in this cavern, and in the metal in particular.

Considering the elevator had also been infused with Quintessence, it may have simply been a property of the metal, and perhaps all it meant was that the machine was still running--or at least could still _be_ run, if they found the switch and flipped it on. But what else was there to collect down here, in a dark, desolate chamber deep underground?

And another thing. Whatever it was collecting... _why_? Pidge had found a few crystalline lenses interspersed with the metal panels, wired together like one was powering the other, but again. Without running more tests, maybe even without turning the machine _on_ , there was no way to know what it was _for._

They'd brought Rover with them for the expedition and sent him on ahead to scout the rest of the cavern. It would take hours just to cross this place, _days_ to scour it all thoroughly. Maybe longer than that, depending on how much rubble they had to move to find anything that had been on the cavern floor.

They checked Rover's progress and blew out a breath. Definitely a week to search this place. Rover had already gone two miles more or less straight ahead, following the outer wall of the cavern, and he still hadn't found the far end.

"How is this place so big?" Pidge asked, scampering up a fallen panel that shifted uneasily under their weight. Keith and Matt had decided to blaze a trail straight through the center of the space, throwing up their bulbs to give at least some faint light to the others. Pidge had used only one of their own, anchoring it high above a section of largely intact panels that they'd stopped to examine. Nevertheless, they could see the broad strokes of the ground around them, and only needed their headlamp to pick out the finer details.

"Are you looking for a real answer here?" Karen asked. "Because this place is so far from Earth I haven't the faintest idea. For all I know, massive cavities like this are entirely normal for Klenahn."

Pidge rolled their eyes. "It was mostly rhetorical. But for what it's worth, I have a hard time believing it's natural. I didn't see anything else like it on the initial scans we did of the planet. But at the same time... it's so _massive._ Filling this place with the mechanism of whatever machine this is would be a big undertaking. Carving it all out first?" They shook their head. "I can't even wrap my head around what into this."

"They had to have had a reason," Karen said. "And a compelling one, at that. The time and money that went into this place... You don't do that just because."

You definitely didn't. And as Pidge scanned the cavern, they tried to think about it reasonably. Panels on the walls to absorb energy. Lenses to focus it? And a big empty space in the center of it all.

A big empty space with who-knew-what piled up underneath all the rubble.

Frowning, Pidge took off toward the mountain Keith and Matt had only recently moved on from. Their mother called out in surprise behind them, but they didn't slow, just leaped from one bit of rubble to the next, using the boost from their jets to cover the distance quickly. Halfway there, they noticed that Hunk, Lance, and Meri were closing in on the same point.

"It's weird, isn't it?" Pidge called. They had a little too much momentum for a graceful landing and wound up dislodging a metal panel the size of a barn door. They hopped off it, catching themself on Hunk and grinning as he steadied them. "A giant heap of junk out here in the middle of nowhere? A whole bunch of them, at that." They tapped their gauntlet to pull up the partial map Rover was broadcasting back to them. He'd already identified seventeen other abnormalities in the rubble patterns--places where it was piled too high, and too localized, like there had already been a structure underneath it all. This just happened to be the closest, though not the largest by far.

Lance summoned his bayard in its glaive form and leaned it against his shoulder. "Well, then. Let's see what's under here."

It was long and grueling work--Meri lifting chunks of rubble away with her bare hands, Lance using his glaive to lever smaller pieces away, Pidge and Hunk helping where they could and trying to watch for anywhere that was too precariously perched, anything that was on the very of giving way beneath the other paladins' weight.

The rest of the team forged ahead in the interim, lights going up one after another and getting farther away each time. The main comms remained open, everyone checking in with major or minor discoveries. Rover completed his perimeter and started a grid search to fill in the middle in the far half of the cavern. Karen finally caught up with Pidge, having crossed the sea of rubble by foot. Pidge gave her a guilty smile, but before they could apologize for ditching her, Lance gave a cry.

Pidge darted forward at the same time as Hunk, eyes going wide. There, poking up out of the rubble, dented and partially crushed but unmistakable, was the mouth of a cannon, easily twenty feet across and aimed at the sky.

"You find something?" Shiro asked. In the distance, the beam of his headlamp swept back toward their position.

Pidge laughed, disbelieving. "Yeah. Hunk was right. This place... This whole giant cavern... I think it’s all one big weapon."


	28. Akira

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keturah used the remnants of her bond with Red to manipulate the red paladins. To protect them, Red possessed Akira, using him to shatter her crystal. Keith, Matt, Akira, and Nyma went to Oriande to find a way to save the dying Red, but the answer they found wasn't what they'd hoped for: Akira gave himself up, taking on Red's spirit so the paladins wouldn't have to fight the war without Voltron. It seemed there was nothing left of Akira in Red--but then the paladins encountered the new Dark Red, a horror made from Red's own essence, and for just a moment, Red claimed to have felt Akira far more clearly than since they first merged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Brief, implied sexual harassment and implied transphobia. Reference to torture, and a character being triggered in regards to the same. Dissociation, depersonalization, and unreality scattered throughout.

"Jesus, Matt." Takashi's voice drifted up the ramp, trembling with a laugh that reeked of terror. "Don't scare me like that. I thought someone _died._ "

Died?

No.

He hadn't died.

He was just...

Different.

He walked down the ramp on legs that felt they belonged to someone else. His head was stuffed full of cotton, his ears ringing with the silence waiting for him. The same silence, in fact, that had accompanied him all the way across Oriande to the complex on the hill where Meloia and several others had sent them all home.

"Let me guess." He froze as Takashi turned toward him, a crooked smile on his face. "This joke was _your_  brilliant idea?"

For a moment, the world around him fuzzed, everything going out of focus. The colors burned too bright, every little noise prickling in his ears like needles. The faces around him--familiar faces--distorted, the angle of this chin too sharp, the furrow of that brow somehow ominous. The one who had come forward with the crooked smile, who had seemed so intimately familiar just a moment ago, might as well now have been a total stranger.

The next moment, his mind cleared. He could have laughed at himself. Of course. Of _course_. That was Takashi, his brother. How could he have forgotten?

He opened his mouth to crack a joke to cover his slip, but the words that tumbled out weren't the words he meant to say. " _That's_  right! You're brothers."

Akira became suddenly, acutely aware of Red--not separate from him, not quite, but distinct enough for the dissonance to ring in his ears like static. He went on speaking, speaking in his voice, the words flowing as naturally as anything but stinging with every syllable. Takashi's eyes darkened, and Akira wished he could stop himself, could apologize, could laugh this all off--but he kept talking, spewing poison with every word, and a flicker of confusion dulled his guilt for a moment. Why should he apologize for not recognizing Takashi, when he'd never seen him up close like this?

"Who are you?" Takashi asked, steel in his voice.

He would have laughed, if Red had let him. Who _was_  he? He didn't think he could call himself Akira, not fully. There were flashes of his old self, to be sure, but he was Red, too. The two of them, twined so tightly together he couldn't tease them apart. He could recognize which impulses came from where, but both felt foreign, and both felt perfectly natural.

The anger and suspicion on Takashi's face, though--that speared him through, and he stepped forward, reaching out a hand like patching this up was as simple as taking his brother by the hand. "Takashi..."

Takashi turned away from him, looking to Matt and Keith for answers, and it stung. It stung more, probably, than it should have, lodging in his chest as the others discussed his decision like he wasn't even there.

Maybe he wasn't.

Maybe _Akira_  was no more.

The guilt and the sympathy squeezed his throat tight as he said, "I promise, this _was_  the only way." He willed Takashi to understand, to let him go. Voltron was more important than any one person.

Matt, though, rounded on him, venom oozing from the sharp edges of his scowl. "That's easy for you to say. You didn't have to sacrifice anything."

Oh, but he had. He'd sacrificed so much more than he’d expected when he made that choice.

* * *

They went down to the Red Lion's hangar, him and Matt together, the air between them crackling with tension. He couldn't exactly _blame_ Matt for his anger, but it did make for some awkward silence. He tried twice to explain that this wasn't something that could be undone. Whether he was Akira, or Red, or something in between...

He was what he was, and it would be easier on them all if Matt would just accept that now.

They reached the hangar a few minutes before the rest of the team, but then they waited there, just inside the door, because apparently they were going to make a spectacle of this. He turned as the others entered, flashing a smile he didn't feel. He'd spent the last few minutes just staring at the lion, reaching out for it without hardly realizing what he was doing, and it was only now that Takashi was here that he came back to himself enough to realize that he'd been trying to make it lower its head, they way he-- _Red_ \--had done a billion times before without having to even think about it.

He turned to cover the flush creeping up his neck and headed for the maintenance hatch on the lion's side.

It was... different... inside the lion.

 _Way_  different.

In here, Akira was hardly more than a memory, a tiny little blip of deja vu that hardly registered over the almost trance-like fixation that drew him toward the broken crystal at the end of the catwalk here. A new crystal lay beside it, glowing softly, radiating warmth and Quintessence that quieted his tangled emotions.

It was kind of cute, actually, plugging in a Balmera crystal in place of his own like they were interchangeable.

He supposed it would do the job, though, now that he didn't need to project himself all the way across the universe. He could still feel echoes of himself inside the fragments of the old crystal, the pulse of the slowly leaking Quintessence whispering in his chest. He snatched up the jar, his heart racing, and dumped the fragments into his palm. The Quintessence blazed to life in response to his touch, burning like hot coals. He set the jar aside and clasped his other hand over top of the crystal fragments, eyes fluttering closed. He breathed, taking in the wayward scraps of his essence. He'd lost a lot of it between shattering the crystal and coming here like this. 

There was no helping that now. At least he was able to salvage some of himself. He drank it in, the tension leaking out of him. It felt like coming home, settling back into his skin. The voice that called itself Akira grew quieter in his mind, lulled and content and wrapped up in everything else that was the Red Lion of Voltron.

Once he'd absorbed the last drop of Quintessence from the fragments, they went dark and cold, and he stared at them, feeling out the edges of his soul--still fragmented, only partially patched up by Akira and by his own Quintessence. Shiro shifted closer, and he started, dumping the crystal fragments back into the jar, which he then passed to Coran. 

"You can mount the new crystal now," he said briskly, shoving down the shivery, on-edge feeling that came with the awareness of Shiro's presence. "This one is done for."

"Just like that?" Lance asked.

"You want this to be harder?"

Lance held up his hands. "No, I mean... You can't just replace the crystal. Can you? I thought that was the whole point of going to Oriande."

"The only reason we needed those specific crystals in the first place was because we'd left our spirits in Oriande. I'm not there anymore, so..." He shrugged. "Any old power source will do."

Matt bristled, and here inside the Lion, he felt it deep inside his chest, an anger tinged sour with hurt. "So, what? You're just going to stay in Akira forever?"

The name brought him back to himself for a moment--as much as was possible at this point. He smiled at Matt, holding his hurt inside him and trying to send comfort back. "I tried to tell you... There's no fixing this--this  _is_  the fix."

They didn't understand. Even as he laid it out for them--what it was to be a lion, what it was to hold the bond... He saw it in their eyes. They didn't understand why it had to be _him._

"This body is the only body that can host me," he said as kindly as he could, "because Akira is my adjunct. He held a piece of my soul."

" _Held?_ " Matt hissed. "Are you telling me Akira is _dead_?"

"Of course not." (Was he?) "He's just..." He scrambled for the words, the dissonance rising loud and rampant in his chest once more. "...part of me now."

Takashi's face went dark and cold, his displeasure spearing him clear through, leaving him breathless and small and totally unprepared for Matt, who swelled with rage.

" _Get out._ "

"What?"

Matt planted a hand on his chest and shoved, nearly toppling him from the railing on which he'd perched. "I said, get out of him."

The words rang in his head, senseless and unsettling. As though there were two any longer, one to stay and one to leave. As though it weren't just _him_ , settled and secure in this union. "I... I can't," he said, wondering why he wished he had another answer to give. "Matt--"

Matt jerked back as he reached out. "At least let Akira speak for himself, since you say he's not dead."

"He's _not_." Was he? ( _Am I?_ )

"Then let me talk to him."

He already was (sort of.) (Did it count?) But that answer wouldn't satisfy anyone, not even himself. "I can't."

" _Why?_ "

"Because--" Because he was himself, and he was what he had been, and he was a new and nauseating swirl of potentiality. Because he'd given himself up, he'd taken him over, he _didn't know who he was._ For a moment, they were separate again, Akira verging on hyperventilation, his thoughts muted and his emotions raging loud; Red quieter, sadder, and ushering him off to the side while she answered in his stead.

"The lines between us are thin, and rapidly fading," she said. He said. _They_  said. "Our memories, our emotions... They're all mixed up together, and there's no teasing them apart anymore. You can't talk to him because _he_  is _me_."

Or he would be soon.

Matt looked ready to throw down, and Akira's heart broke for him, even as the momentary separation dissolved and Red's calm enveloped him once more.

"Bullshit," Matt growled. "You took Akira away from us."

_I offered._

"He's an idiot," Matt snapped, and he wondered if he'd spoken that aloud, or if Matt only knew him that well. "No one else agreed to this." Matt was shaking now, and he wanted to pull him close, to take the hurt away. He wanted to not be the reason for it. 

Another heartbeat, and Matt's next words drowned the aching sympathy in icy cold.

"You _get_  that this is the sort of thing Keturah does, right? Stealing people's bodies. Taking away their autonomy. She did it to Shiro. She's doing it to _my dad_  right now. And now you went and did the same thing to Akira."

The ice became a blade. A blade of shame and hurt and fury that cut straight through him, silencing half-formed thoughts and lighting him up from his very core with an agony that blotted out the world around him.

He caught a glimpse of the astral realm--what tiny corner of it he'd claimed. His own Heart, raging and burning and fractured through. Silver light blazed up from the fissures in the ground as the wounds slowly knit together, the fabric of his being struggling to be whole once more.

For a moment, he was himself again, and he stood beside the Red Lion--he knew it was her, though she wore his face.

That face was slack with horror, golden eyes blazing and tears welling up within. Flickers of borrowed memories crowded the air around them, crushed his lungs with echoes of pain and a hatred so intense it left him motionless as Red shoved him back, shoved him _down_ , down beneath the surface of an aching cold into darkness that silenced his very soul.

* * *

Red was young when she chose Keturah.

It was an odd thing to say, that Red was _young_. A mechanical lion and a kotha spirit outside of time, but she _felt_  young, in this time. Or perhaps it was just that in the present she felt _old_. Weary. Maybe a little jaded. Far too keenly aware of the universe and all its horrors.

The Red who had chosen Keturah was none of these things. She had witnessed cruelty, but she had not been the target. She didn't know what it meant to be wary. She still trusted with ease.

She trusted _Keturah._

Keturah's heart burned like a bonfire as she stood before the Red Lion, proud and anxious and ready to prove herself. Red's current paladin was growing old, and she was nearly ready to step down. She had been training several potential heirs, but Keturah was one of the few who had stuck it out.

She was one of the few Red hadn't rejected out of hand.

Standing here now, just the two of them alone in the hangar, silent and expectant, Red considered her decision one last time. Black had cautioned her not to choose her paladin rashly, but Red didn't know any other way. She couldn't draft a list of pros and cons, conduct interviews with all the candidates, look ahead to see how well they would mesh.

She was the Red Lion, the embodiment of instinct, raw motion caged in a metal shell. She didn't _choose_  her paladin. She _found_  them, and they found her.

Ever since she'd found Keturah, she'd known she was the one. Her passion, her exhilaration, burned as bright today as ever before. Keturah had something to prove--to herself, to her peers, to the other paladins. She wanted to make something of herself, and she'd been dreaming of glory and great deeds for as long as Red had known her.

It resonated with Red, that ambition. Neither one of them knew how to sit still, how to be content with what they had. They wanted more, and they would seize it, together.

Keturah knelt on the hangar floor, subservient in posture but _burning_  with the urge to stand and barrel into Red's cockpit, to take what she'd been dreaming of for so long. Red laughed at the thought--no mortal could _take_  a Lion. But Red almost would have liked to see Keturah try.

Somewhere, in some quiet corner of Red's mind, Black heaved a sigh. Yellow exuded fond exasperation, Blue cheered her on. Green only watched, curious, and deferred to Black when she once more cautioned Red against a hasty decision she would not be able to take back.

 _ **Why would I ever want to take this back?**_  Red asked. Keturah's heart blazed with desire, and it kindled a sympathetic flame in Red's core. She stood, lifting her head to the heavens, and roared her decision for all to hear. _**This is my paladin.**_

The bond crystallized between them, all of Keturah's wonder, all of her joy pouring into Red, lighting her up, calling her onward and upward. Keturah wouldn't be able to feel Red's pride, her excitement, not in any great detail. Their bond was too new for that, and Keturah wasn't as sensitive to it as Red and her sisters. What little she did feel she would feel only vaguely, and it would be difficult for her to pick it apart from her own thoughts and emotions.

That was okay. She didn't need to understand to feel Red calling her up the ramp, into the cockpit, where the pilot's seat and controls were waiting for her. Keturah whooped in delight as she charged up the ramp. She stopped in the entryway, and Red preened as Keturah's awe bubbled up to fill them both, giddy and infectious.

After a moment, Keturah remembered how to breathe, and she sank into the chair, running her hands over the dashboard, over the throttle. She curled her fingers around the grip, and Red felt an itch to get up and fly. Keturah's itch, but it was an itch Red was intimately familiar with, and one that sank in hooks as soon as Red noticed the direction of Keturah's thoughts. 

It wasn't the way they were supposed to do things; Black liked them all to try to spend an hour or two with their newly-chosen paladins in quiet contemplation, cementing the bond and exploring its possibilities.

 _ **Red,**_ Black said, reproach and warning packed into a single syllable.

Red ignored her, tossing her head back in a roar as Keturah broke into a grin. They turned as one, every motion in tune, and charged down the tunnel toward open sky. The stars awaited them, sparkling as though they, too, were burning from within, adrenaline singing in their conduits and laughter ringing in their soul.

Keturah strained toward those stars, and Red was so caught up in her pull, in the force of her personality and the way their hearts resonated, that she could do nothing but chase Keturah's dreams.

* * *

The kindred-spirit pull became a knife in Red's chest as Keturah seized hold of their bond and _twisted_.

Red roared, a pain that rippled across time, through a hundred rapid-fire flashes of torture that spanned eons. It was hard to focus on just one moment, just one instance of betrayal. How many times had Keturah come to her like this? How many times had she demanded what Red would never give her again?

Keturah was older in most of these memories--but in the earlier, she was not yet horribly changed. Sharper, yes, her flame turned to cold steel that cut whenever Red tried to reach out. But she was still herself, mostly.

Enough to hurt.

Time passed, and she became less herself, her face twisting and her Quintessence darkening as though to match the guise she'd adopted, the guise of a Galra researcher. A druid, she called herself. _Haggar._

It was easier, in some ways, when she did not come as herself. Keturah stopped her aging, and Red began, shedding her youthful optimism and closing herself off to the world around. Her rage built, a flame waiting only for open air to burst alight--but Red kept a tight lid on it, fearing that if she released it, Keturah would find some way to twist it to her advantage.

It was easier--and _safer_ \--to shut it all away, to withdraw, descend within herself, cloak herself in the darkness of isolation. Give Keturah nothing to work with.

The rage remained, however, burning hotter and brighter with each of Keturah's visits, becoming a thing apart from herself, as though it were some vengeful spirit rising to defend her.

Keturah returned, and the fury rose to meet her.

* * *

A fist connected with Akira's face, and for a few seconds, the world condensed to the crunch of his nose, the burst of pain that whited out his vision, and the heat that followed, rapidly spreading until it seemed liquid fire had pooled in every contour of his face. It throbbed in the bridge of his nose, slipped behind his eyes, reached out fingers for his cheekbones, his ears... Even his teeth hurt.

On second thought, that might have been the fall.

He didn't remember going down, but he felt concrete beneath him, scratching against the palms of his hands. His vision was still spotty with pain and flickers of light, but he was sure there would be scrapes all up his arms later.

The heat-pain-tightness in his face turned liquid, a drop of molten fire sliding down his lip and the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth.

Through the haze, he caught a flicker of motion--a change in the shadows on the back of his eyelids, maybe the scrape of a sneaker on concrete. He blinked, but didn't wait for his vision to clear. Hands stinging, he shoved himself up, wrangling uncoordinated legs until he got a foot wedged against the ground enough to shove him up and forward in a desperate lunge toward the source of the motion.

His head hit the other boy's ribs, jarring his teeth again and making his nose pulse with fresh agony--but the _ooph_  as his opponent staggered and fell was worth a little pain. They landed together, hard, but Akira had the advantage of already riding out the first wave of pain. He scrambled up the other body, clawing at arms, at collars, at anything he could get his hands on, like an ungainly monkey scaling a toppled tree.

He cocked his hand back and drove it into the other boy's face, his knuckles splitting open as they found teeth. Ryan--Akira _thought_  it was Ryan, the way he was shrieking--grabbed at his wrists, trying to force Akira's hands away from his face, but Akira was all-in now. His nose throbbing, his eyes burning, prickling with tears of frustration as well as the watery eyes that came after a blow to the nose--Akira was all too familiar with _that_ , and how futile it was to try to fight it, and how it didn't matter, because everyone around him was just going to jump on him anyway, like they wouldn't tear up if he caved _their_ noses in--

He reared back again, blinking his eyes clear, and this time his fist found Ryan's nose. He felt the satisfying shift of the cartilage giving way, and Ryan howled even louder than before, bucking beneath Akira as he gave up on wresting him away and did his best to curl around his nose, blood already smearing all over his fingers.

Akira grinned, the taste of blood sharp enough to imagine crimson teeth and a wicked line of bloody spittle. He turned his head and spat red onto the sidewalk.

Shouts, motion around him. Right--Ryan hadn't confronted him alone. Of course he hadn't; he was a coward, and the only way he would dare anything more than biting comments and a muttered slur was if he outnumbered Akira ten to one. There had been a crowd when all this began, though Akira would be hard-pressed to name any of the others. Jackson and Lang, probably. He didn't think either of them were friends with Ryan, exactly, but they'd bonded over their bigotry.

Several of those who had gathered were fleeing now. Maybe they'd reconsidered their choice of entertainment, or maybe they'd only forgotten how hard Akira hit back. Didn't matter. The fewer people there were, the better off Akira was.

Leaving Ryan writhing on the ground, Akira shot to his feet, charging toward the nearest body and giving it a shove. He wanted to fight them all-- _needed_  to, his blood boiling and the pain in his face making rational thought hard--but he was still outnumbered, and he needed space as much as he needed to feel another nose give under his fist. All it would take was two or three of them pinning him, and he'd be at their mercy.

He moved on instinct, lashing out at anything that came close--shoving, swinging, kicking, biting, _anything_  to keep their hands off him. As much as the blood on his face, he felt Ryan's hand sliding up under his shirt, teasing, _taunting_ \--

People were shouting, spitting, scrambling all around. Akira took more punches, went down again a few more times, but he kept moving, didn't let them hold him down. The pain of his new bruises was nothing next to the emotion inside him flying too high to be contained. They needed to put him down hard enough that he couldn't get back up; he only needed to do enough damage to ruin their fun.

(He didn't let himself consider the ones who were here out of hatred rather than boredom, the ones who would fight back, the ones who would get angry instead of scared. With any luck, there were only a few of those, and Akira might be able to take them if he scared the rest off fast enough.)

The fight dragged on, though, most of the combatants falling back to cheer on those who kept going, and Akira began to flag. His anger burned hotter and faster, letting the frustration show through, and his breath hitched in his throat as fresh tears pressed at the back of his eyes. He kept fighting anyway, snarling and clawing at the ones who remained, wanting them to feel a little of the hurt they'd inflicted.

He went down again, the breath rushing from his lungs as his back his dirt, the edge of the sidewalk digging into his hip. He smelled crushed grass and wondered whether they'd ventured into someone's yard, whether there would be anyone home to see what was happening. Ryan and his jerk friends had ambushed Akira a block from school, on the sidewalk in front of an abandoned lot.

He should have waited at the school, he knew, but the halls there were as deserted as anywhere after the last bus left, and Akira had figured it was safer to put some distance between him and the school's resident asshats than wait around and hope no one else had realized his brother had a student council meeting after school today.

Seemed like Akira couldn't do _anything_  right these days. Ignore the bullies, and they decided he was an easy target. Stand up to them, and he made bitter enemies of the ringleaders and all their cronies. Stand his ground, and they mobbed him. Run away, and they hunted him down.

Why was he even still fighting? Why did he bother? He only made things worse for himself whenever he tried.

A new warmth took root in his chest--comforting at first, then burning white-hot. It spurred him back into action, dragging him back to his feet as Ryan and Lang--the last two still fighting, both of them bloodied and rumpled--closed in. The anger was back in force--not just anger at dicks like these who refused to get their heads out of their asses long enough to see Akira as anything other than a freak of nature.

Anger at everything. At everyone who thought they got to shit all over other people because, well, what did other people matter, really? People like these just wanted the universe to fling itself at their feet, give them everything they could possibly want, and to not put up a fuss about the cost.

Why couldn't life just _leave him alone?_

Akira lashed out, his vision blurring as he threw himself at the other two, heedless of his own injuries. He didn't _care_ anymore. He just wanted it to _stop_. He just wanted to be left alone.

Lang went down quickly, Akira's hand throbbing, his knuckles cracked and bleeding, his chest heaving. He'd given up on breathing through his nose a long time ago, and the blood was so thick in his mouth that he kept having to pause to spit it out. He'd already swallowed too much, and he was sure any more would have him heaving up blood all over the grass.

Thankfully, Lang stayed down, his mouth a smear of scarlet, curled in a ball and sobbing pathetically. Ryan stared at him, suddenly uncertain, and at the stragglers all around. There were only three of them now, all of them quieter and more subdued than just a few minutes earlier. They looked like they were considering slipping away--and they certainly weren't going to step in to help Ryan.

And he was, as always, a coward. Now that it was just the two of them, he lost his cocky swagger, the whites of his eyes showing as he followed Akira's movements. He wiped the back of his hand across his face, smearing the blood that leaked from his nose. Akira's own nose was still bleeding, a slow, oozing drip that plipped on his shirt, on the pavement.

He bared his teeth, and Ryan fell back a step, catching himself only after a snicker from one of the remaining onlookers. Scowling, he jabbed a finger at Akira. "You're gonna pay for this."

Akira laughed as Ryan fled, then stared down at Lang, who seemed to have decided to play dead. He was still crying softly, curled up in the fetal position, but he seemed to be trying to stifle himself, like Akira might forget he was there.

A savage pleasure spread through Akira, chasing the fiery trail of the anger that had swept through him moments before. He stepped over Lang, watching him cry. Lang was nothing; a petty bully and a coward, but he was a good start.

If only he could see Keturah on the ground like that, wallowing in the ruins of her own hubris.

The world around him rippled, stopping him in his tracks as the neighborhood held its breath. He was acutely aware of another presence in his head, in his chest. It recoiled from him, and the air crackled in anticipation of--of what? Remorse? Reproach?

A hand came down on his shoulder, and guilt flooded Akira's gut. Excuses sprang to his lips, ready-made and waiting to spill out as he was turned around--

* * *

"What the _hell_ is your problem?"

Akira recoiled as Nyma's face resolved mere inches from his own, the violet of her eyes flashing like laserfire, her lip pulled back to show the surprisingly sharp points of her teeth. His heart was pounding, his skin too-tight, his eyes struggling to adjust to the dim light of--

Where was he?

His head lolled back, and his vision swam with the motion, the world around him tilting out of balance as his mouth opened and words came out of their own accord, like some part of him knew what was happening and how to respond.

"I think you know already. Right?" A smile pulled at his lips. "I stole Akira's body. I dared to try to salvage the one weapon that might be able to stop Zarkon and his armies from conquering the entire universe. It was the right choice, but it hurt the mortals' feelings, so now I'm the bad guy."

Akira's chest seized up, his vision going dim at the edges as the conversation continued without him. This wasn't... _couldn't be_  real. He wasn't actually here. He was just... visiting? Witnessing someone else's argument? It was like some sort of bizarre dream, or maybe a hallucination

But that was Nyma, and they were talking about him, about how someone had stolen his body.

_Red._

It had to be, though it made no sense. He'd... He'd given himself up to Red. On Oriande. He remembered it, if only vaguely. They'd merged, and though Akira had remained aware for a short time after, he'd felt...

Well, he'd felt like this, only not so self-aware. Like a passenger in his own body. A current of someone else's subconscious.

But that had stopped. Hadn't it? He didn't remember...

He didn't know what he didn't remember, he supposed. But he could tell there was a gap. He was alone, for one thing, and the ache that lurked in his chest--in Red's chest--told him an awful lot had happened that he'd missed out on while he was revisiting high school bullies and his own screwed up sense of self-preservation.

He only came back to himself--or, rather, to Red, and to the conversation she was carrying on--when Nyma's voice softened.

"They miss you, you know," she said. "Keith and Matt. They aren't angry. They're just hurting. They just want you back."

An unnameable emotion welled up in his chest. Fondness and guilt and longing, all in one. He wanted to say something. He thought, maybe, he should apologize, but he didn't know what for. He couldn't regret this decision, not as long as it had worked. Not as long as Red was still here.

He found himself smiling, the ache compacting to a fist around his heart, making his throat tight and his breath come shallow. The ache was his own, but he knew, intrinsically, that it was Red's, too. On this, they were of one mind.

"Do yourself a favor?" he said, and he wasn't sure if it was him or if it was Red who said it, but he meant it just the same, reaching out to touch Nyma's elbow in an attempt to make her understand. "Don't get your hopes up. There's too much inside my head right now. I don't..." He trailed off, the sudden weight of it hitting him all at once. Not just the strange detachment he felt as he sat here, carrying on a conversation or only pretending to. Not just the memories that had preceded it, which he could only vaguely recall.

Everything.

He... remembered.

He thought he did.

 _Red_ remembered, and they were close enough to the same thing that Akira felt as though he remembered, too. Not every detail of the past... weeks? But enough. Enough to see how much the team was hurting. Enough to know it was his fault.

Maybe he shouldn't have done this.

Maybe he should have thought more carefully before he dove in.

Maybe that was just an echo of his former self talking. Maybe he just wished he was still who they wanted him to be, because maybe if he was he could fix everything that he'd broken.

"I don't even know who I am, really," he admitted, and he didn't think he'd ever said anything more honest. "I can't promise that any of what you want from me is still in there to be found. So just--don't. Don't expect more than what I'm giving you. That way no one has to get hurt."

The pain in Nyma's eyes, the way she watched him, searched him, made him feel like maybe, somehow, she saw through him. He hoped that meant she understood what it was he was trying to tell her.

There was no way to be sure. She seemed unable to find her voice, and the lull of whatever sleep had claimed him before was pulling him under once more. Red bristled around him, sharp and wary again as Nyma finally spoke.

The words were lost to Akira's ears, and he closed his eyes as the darkness claimed him.

* * *

Red didn't notice, at first, when Keturah first started lying to her.

Not lying...

She didn't like to think of it as lying.

But Keturah was hiding things, and had been for some time before Red realized what was going on.

She disappeared for hours at a time. That in itself wasn't unusual; this was well before the war, well before the universe had any real need for Voltron. They got calls occasionally--ancient beasts in the sky or under the earth of distant planets that rose to threaten the locals' way of life. This was what Voltron _had been_ , once upon a time. Not a weapon of war, but something to defend against the old dangers that mortals normally couldn't hope to counter.

The universe was wide, and there were a great many dangers waiting to rise up and demand Voltron's attention--enough that no one had any real thought that Voltron would outlive its usefulness. There would always be someone, somewhere, in need of aid.

But not every moment of every day. The paladins had lives outside of their duties. Families. Hobbies. They might go weeks between missions, or even longer. Sometimes there were great rushes, when everything happened all at once, but for the most part the work was a slow and steady trickle.

So it wasn't strange for Red to go days without hearing from Keturah. Sure, in the early days of their partnership, they had both been so caught up in it all that they had gone out flying at almost any opportunity--but those days were behind them. Keturah had cooled, if Red had not.

Keturah's world did not revolve around Red, and that was fine. But there was a difference between the times when Keturah was occupied with other pursuits, merely passive in the bond but still present, and the times when she shut herself away.

Red didn't like to say that Keturah was hiding, but that was what it felt like. Like she had drawn a cloak around herself, faded into the shadows, put a damper on their bond. (Such a thing was not possible, of course. Not for any of the Lions, much less the paladins. The bond was a constant thing, not something to be flipped on and off at will.)

Still, there were times when Keturah went away and she did not merely grow quiet in the bond, but vanished altogether. Even when Red went searching, she could find nothing, as though she had no paladin at all.

It scared her.

Perhaps that was why it took her so long to notice it. (To _admit_  it.) It was easier to ignore it, to pretend that nothing was wrong whatsoever. Keturah's presence was quieter now than it had once been. Surely this was just another facet of that. Surely this wasn't... whatever it was it seemed from the outside.

But she couldn't deny it forever.

 _ **Where do you go between missions?**_  she asked once when Keturah returned from one such absence.

Keturah seemed genuinely surprised at the question, pausing on the hangar floor looking up at Red. "What do you mean?"

Red hesitated. She felt guilty, in a way, for thinking anything was amiss. Keturah was a good paladin, a good friend, and always had been. Even if she _was_  hiding herself, she must have had a reason. She deserved her privacy, so maybe Red ought to leave it alone.

Her curiosity, though, was too great--and her fear. _**When we have no missions,**_ she said.  _ **When there is a stretch of time for you to do as you please. Sometimes you leave the castle, and I cannot see where you go, or what you do. I have never experienced that with my other paladins. I am... curious.**_

She wasn't sure if Keturah could sense what she wasn't saying. That it wasn't idle curiosity alone that motivated her question. She didn't seem uncomfortable, though, her voice in the bond going softer even as she stepped forward and laid a hand on Red's snout. "I didn't realize I was doing anything wrong," she said.

 _ **You have done nothing wrong,**_  Red said quickly, afraid to offend. Keturah _hadn't_  done anything wrong, not so far as Red knew. Strange, perhaps, but not _wrong._ _ **I only wanted to know what you did because I have never seen it before.**_

"Alfor's been on me about centering my mind and whatever," Keturah said with a wave of her hand. "I don't know. I've been trying this meditation junk. Maybe that's it?"

That felt wrong (It _was_  wrong, said a voice that didn't sound like Red's own), but Red had no reason to distrust her paladin. Not now, and not ever before. And... perhaps it was possible that some form of meditation might be the cause. Perhaps if Keturah withdrew to a quiet world, took a break from the bustle of castle life, perhaps found a mountain to climb or an ocean in which to swim or a forest to shade her while she rested... Somewhere far away from Red... With meditation to quiet her mind, perhaps that could account for why Red could not detect her presence.

She rumbled in discontent. _**I do not like what Alfor wants to make you. We are wildfire. We should not be tamed.**_

Keturah laughed at that, patting Red's snout and cooing at her anger. "I know, Red. I know. I didn't like it at first, either. But he was right! If I slow down and think about things, I can see it all more clearly. I can plan ahead. It's made me a better paladin _and_ a better teammate. I don't mean to worry you by going off alone... Maybe I could bring you along next time? We could meditate together."

If Red were human then, she would have curled her lip at the thought, and Keturah laughed again, as though she had known what Red's response would be.

Perhaps she had.

Perhaps, in retrospect, it was all part of the ploy.

Red never had learned what it was Keturah did when she left the castle, or where she went. If it were only meditation, could she have not done it in the castle itself?

But Keturah left no time for such questions. "Come on," she said, ducking inside Red's mouth and hurrying up the ramp. "The others are probably waiting for us by now."

She wasn't wrong--the paladins had a mission today, and Red was surely the last of them to leave the castle. She tucked her questions away, somehow ashamed not only to have wasted time with her interrogation but that she had suspected anything in the first place. She and Keturah flew together just as they always had, perfectly in sync and tearing through the fleet of a warmongering lord who had lost power on his home planet and thought to seek it elsewhere.

If everything was as it had been, she thought as they returned to the castle after the fight, what was there to complain about? Whether Keturah meditated when she went off alone, or whether there was more to these excursions than she wanted known, it made no difference. Red shouldn't fuss about it. Everything was fine.

It was _fine._

* * *

Years passed, forwards and back, seasons flickering like a light about to go out, people growing old, growing young, there one moment and gone the next. Altea became Earth became Oriande became the horrible, nameless vessel that had been Zarkon's first warship, where Red had been a prisoner for a thousand years before Zarkon grew bored of Haggar's experiments and sent the druid and the lion both to one of his generals, where he could ignore them to focus on his own plans for conquest.

The memories, too, blurred together, as fluid as time itself was. A thousand moments, a hundred emotions, all layered over one another until there was nothing left to distinguish one from another, like countless voices crying out in a massive crowd.

Was this what it meant to be immortal? To have so much battering against your mental walls at all times? Too many memories for one mind to contain, too much suffering to bear, and the joy bursting through at unexpected moments like a beam of light in the middle of a storm, bringing tears to the eye because of its rarity and leaving a terrible, hollow ache when it left.

He wanted it to end.

Keturah younger, smiling, happy, was agony and nostalgia wrapped into one. How easy to forget what she would go on to do, and how hard to let it go, when he blinked and found himself broken and lifeless on the floor of her workship, his innards spilling out around him, every intimate piece of himself on display as she searched for answers she would never find.

Keturah, _Haggar_ now, reaching inside him with a hand like an icy vice, seizing hold of the tattered ends of their bond and _twisting_ until he couldn't hold onto the bars of his self-imposed prison. He'd passed so much of his time in her hold dreaming, sleeping away the torment, shutting out Keturah and her demands.

He couldn't sleep now, jolting awake as the pain consumed him.

(He was on Oriande, for just a moment, standing tall as Keturah came to him, ready to burn Oriande to the ground just to get at him. He denied her, and she burned a brand into his chest, reached inside him and--)

She was relentless, clawing at his resolve, grasping at the remnants of what they'd once had. There was nothing left for her to use (There shouldn't have been, but that didn't stop her; she found something, reforged their connection, learned to pick up the frayed ends. He thought he'd severed their bond, but she was still inside him--inside his new paladins now, until he had no choice but to end it--) She pulled and pulled, and he thought if she didn't get what she wanted, she might just kill him instead.

He still didn't give in.

(The crystal shattered, shards of his very essence raining down into the depths of the dark chamber inside an empty hull. He watched them fall, felt the flame inside him splutter and go cold, and he smiled. Never again would he be a tool in her hands.)

Oriande again, and the brand still burned where Keturah had touched him, her fingers, her Quintessence itself digging into his skin. He tossed his head back and roared, and even when she retreated, when the Sages sent her away, she didn't let go of him.

She only ripped a piece of him out and left him bleeding.

(That was what they did, Zarkon and Keturah. They ripped people apart. Stole pieces from them. Left them broken and frayed, left them to stitch themselves back together.)

Akira sat with Takashi, alone in a quiet room in a castle that hadn't yet become familiar. It was too quiet, and too bright, and all the blank metal walls felt impersonal and _alien_  in a way that even the Alteans themselves couldn't quite match. Takashi was quiet, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket--a jacket he didn't need, not when the castle was warmer than all that silver might have suggested and he'd never liked loose clothes to begin with. He was jittery, his leg bouncing and his eyes fixed on the baseboard of the far wall.

The fighting was over, at least for now, the invading alien army routed and Earth digging into the long, hard work of rebuilding. Takashi still had work to do, of course, as did all the paladins--clean-up and humanitarian aid and advising on defenses and politics over at the UN, because somewhere between landing a spot as the Garrison's youngest solo pilot and coming home with a scar on his face and a streak of ghostly white in his hair, he'd gone and made a name for himself that even heads of state couldn't afford to ignore.

"Everything okay?" Akira asked, running sweaty palms down the length of his thighs. He was nervous without knowing why, maybe because he hadn't seen his brother in a year and neither of them seemed to know how to act, maybe because Takashi looked like he was standing on the edge of a new battlefield.

"Fine," Takashi said. He breathed, hands in his pockets pulling the two sides of his jacket closer together. "There's something I haven't told you yet."

"Oh?" Akira tried not to let the fear get the better of him. There was plenty they hadn't had a chance to talk about yet, like where Takashi had been, how he'd wound up leading the fight against Zarkon's empire, what it meant to be a paladin. Hell, if he and Matt weren't so sickeningly affectionate all the time, to the point that keeping their relationship secret was literally impossible, Akira might not even know about _that_  yet.

Takashi opened his mouth, closed it again, pulled his hands out of his pockets. He had on a pair of gloves, too--sturdy ones, not the fingerless type he liked to wear because he thought they were cool. Had space messed with his temperature regulation or something? Because the Castle of Lions was in no way winter weather.

With a heavy sigh, Takashi gave up on whatever it was he'd been trying to say and settled instead for pulling the glove off his right hand. Akira reached for a snarky comment, only for the words to die on his tongue when he realized the skin beneath the glove wasn't skin at all, but a sleek silver metal, embellished gold on the knuckles. A soft blue glow that Akira had already learned to associate with Alteans pulsed in the hairline cracks between the metal plates.

Takashi didn't look at him, but quietly removed his jacket, revealing the rest of the arm. Black armored plates covered most of it, the silver showing through at the joints. A crimson V was etched onto his shoulder like a tattoo. He wore a tank top, so Akira could see exactly how high the metal climbed--all the way up, capping his shoulder and held in place by a pair of straps that disappeared under his shirt.

"I lost the arm a long time ago," Takashi said. "And this prosthetic is so good I hardly even notice most of the time. I just--thought you should know."

(This was what they did. They took and they took and they took. They left you broken and bleeding, and all your suffering didn't even make a blip on their radar.)

Takashi's voice faded before the numbness that had come with the shock--but then it was Meri standing before him, her eyes sliding away, her face gaunt and her _glaes_ bleeding and an emptiness in her that said they'd taken something from her, too, even if that something wasn't as tangible as an arm.

(They _took,_  and they _took_ , and he couldn't _stop them._ )

Matt, smiling despite the smattering of crystal scars that puckered the left side of his face, from browline to jaw, the electric blue of his left eye burning like a beacon, warning of what the Empire did to people who crossed it.

(He hated them for it.)

Val, wasted away to skin and bones, her hair hacked off and her skin sallow and her posture wary. He'd thought her dead for so long, but somehow she had lost more of her vibrancy by living than she would have by dying.

(He hated himself more for letting Keturah become what she was.)

A needle in his arm. Something metal digging into his scalp. Hands on his, not cruel but cold.

An Olkari man--he should have known him--talking him through everything they were doing, assuring him it would all be over soon, but all Akira could think was that it was too much like _her_. Too much like her tests, like her exploration.

She'd always just wanted to know how he ticked, how to make him obey, and she'd siphoned off whatever she needed to make her dream a reality.

But Matt and Keith wanted this.

He'd come here _to do this._

Better to do it now, when they didn't have to see how weak he was.

Better to do it fast.

Not fast enough, not when Keith and Matt came stumbling in, their emotions bleeding out, leeching into the air, curling around his throat, around his heart. He didn’t want them to see him like this. He wished he could give them what they so desperately wanted. But what they wanted was not him, adamantly so.

He couldn't get out of there fast enough when the Olkari man was done with all his tests. He ran back to the lion on legs that felt like saplings and collapsed into the cool darkness that was as foreign as everything else, now.

(It was too much. No matter where he went, no matter how he fought, it was never good enough to stop the pain that suffused the universe, eating away at everything good like a poison.)

(He just wanted to _sleep._ )

* * *

He woke to the sight of Takashi, walking away.

There was tension in his shoulders, and the grip Allura maintained on his arm said she was ready to hold him back--or maybe she was preparing to strike someone in his defense. Somewhere nearby, Black rumbled a warning he felt more than heard.

"Shiro."

His voice, but it felt wrong, sandpaper inside his throat--rough from disuse and fighting against him as he searched for something else to say. He started forward, toward his brother, who had stopped, Allura turning partway to side-eye him _hard._

" _Shiro_."

His voice, but not his _words._

The illusion wore off, and he pulled away from the scene--the memory--the dream. He wasn't in control here, a layer of gauze between him and the world around him. Takashi began to turn, and the disgust in the curl of his lip cut Akira to the core.

(Disgust, but also pain.)

(He saw that, too, before the dream faded.)

* * *

Keturah was hiding again, a curtain drawn over her mind, a cloak raised to shield her from Red's attention. By now, it was a usual thing. It didn't happen every day, not nearly, but at least once a week, Red would reach for Keturah and find only silence on the other end of the bond. Often these moments happened when Keturah was away from the castle-ship; occasionally they happened when, as far as Red knew, Keturah was still nearby.

It seemed less innocent now, not a byproduct of meditation Alfor had asked her to try, but a slap in the face when all Red wanted was to have what they'd had before.

There was tension in the air today. An argument among the paladins. Keturah was blocking her out again, so she couldn't see any details for herself, but all her sisters felt it, too. Zarkon was still missing, Black along with him, the both of them so distant it was hard to communicate.

The concern she felt whenever she reached out for Black told her the paladins were right to worry.

Blue's tension spiked, and Red reached out inquisitively. It was maddening, not being able to look through her own paladin's eyes, but Keturah had gotten too good at shutting her out, and though she'd been poking and prodding the bond for the better part of an hour now, she had nothing to show for it.

 _ **What's wrong?**_  Red asked.

_**Lealle.** _

That was all the answer she got--only, "Lealle," and an anxious buzz. Irritated, Red looked to the castle's systems and found that a shuttle had just left from the lower levels. Odd. Where was Lealle going so suddenly? And why not take Blue?

Red's unease compounded when another shuttle left, following the same path as Lealle's. Red could sense nothing of those on board, but she knew...

Keturah was there.

Twenty minutes later, Keturah returned.

Lealle did not.

* * *

Akira had a complicated relationship with Japan.

He hadn't been born there, but they still had family there--an aunt and uncle who lived in Osaka and grandparents in a small rural town. They visited at least once a year, and in some ways Akira loved the trips. Seeing family, experiencing his culture--the bustle of city life, the markets down by the port, the festivals, when they happened to visit at the right time. Akira loved it all. Japan was a bright, busy place, and on the rare occasion they got to visit Tokyo, it was even better.

He could do without the visits to the shrines, but Takashi seemed obsessed with the reverent hush of those sorts of places. It soothed him, though it only left an itch beneath Akira's skin.

But there was so much to do in Osaka that the shrines were hardly a momentary distraction. All in all, Akira loved visiting his aunt and uncle.

His grandparents....

Well, it got better once they started calling him _Akira_  and gave up on shoving paper fans and Hello Kitty dolls at him.

He still didn't like the neighbors, and he was under no illusion that they liked him.

Visiting his grandparents was one of the few times he appreciated the seclusion that was so rare in this country. Easier to find here in the countryside, but still something precious to be hoarded.

The neighbors were visiting now. Or... he assumed they were. The drowse of the hills made it hard to keep track of things sometimes, especially when he was still half-asleep. There was a grassy slope to the north of the village, too steep for the rice terraces that filled the opposite end of the valley. A hundred feet or so above Akira's position, the forest crowded in--tightly clustered thickets of emerald green that raced up the mountains like they were trying to reach the low-hanging clouds overhead.

With the mountains all around, this little valley felt like a glimpse of another world, a tiny blotch of lighter green dotted with a few cottages and some raised stone paths. Even just getting here was an ordeal, and they'd be staying the whole week just to make the trip worth it.

Akira didn't belong here.

It was a strange feeling, something beyond the unease that always dogged him when he came out here. Usually a hike up into the woods would loosen his chest, but today he was too tired for a hike. He felt _old_. Old and weary and like he was trying to force himself into a mold he didn't fit.

He felt like crying.

There was a knot of restless energy lying just beneath his sternum, a little like anger, a little like grief. He wanted to go back inside. His family was there, and he missed them, inexplicably.

Why did he feel like crying?

Footsteps crunched on gravel behind him, and his chest tightened. He pushed himself up on an elbow and turned--

But it was only vapor, and the grassy slope beneath him burned away like mist in the morning sun. He lay, now, on a bed of lava, a red haze all around him, deep shadows creeping in around the edges of his vision. There was a pressure in his ears, dampening sound, dampening even the silence of this place. The air clung to his skin, a tangible weight.

There was a storm on the horizon, racing toward him. He thought about getting up, finding shelter, but he knew before he thought it that there was no shelter here.

The storm hit, and all he could do was shield his eyes against the wind and the rain.

* * *

Lealle was dead.

The news hit them all hard--none harder than Blue, of course, who's pain radiated into them all. There was a hole in the team, and even when Meri stepped forward to fill it, it wasn't the same. They'd lost paladins before, even lost them tragically, but never at the hand of one of their own.

Red hated Zarkon for what he'd done. Hated her own powerlessness. Hated Keturah for shutting herself off, though she knew that was grief, too. They all mourned in their own way.

(What a joke. Looking back on this now, it was obvious that Keturah's silence wasn't grief. She returned Red's aching, angry energy, but was careful not to give off anything of her own. She comforted the other paladins, made a show of grieving with them, but there was blood on her hands, and once you knew, it was impossible to fall for her lies.)

Black had returned to them, after a bitter fight against Zarkon. Black herself had ejected him from her cockpit, crying desperation to her sisters, and the paladins hadn't needed to lift a finger; Red and the others gathered Black between them and escorted her back to the castle, leaving Zarkon to die in the cold expanse of space.

(If only they were so lucky.)

Black sat now, dormant, in the heart of the castle. Alfor had locked her away, but the barrier raised around her was almost redundant; Black herself had shut down, wrapping herself in bitterness and regret. She spoke to no one. Red wasn't even certain she _heard_  her sisters calling to her.

Battles raged, and Red charged into each with a reckless fury only matched by Keturah's own. They were divine retribution in these battles, tearing through Zarkon's fleet whenever their paths crossed. People died, the Guard dwindled, Zarkon turned his wrath on innocent worlds.

And Red kept fighting.

She didn't know what else to do.

Until Alfor proved himself a coward. He forbid the paladins to join a battle--the last great battle of the war, as it would turn out. Red rammed her head against the hangar door as her sisters roared in grief and helplessness. People were dying out there. The Guard--what remained of it--was decimated in the fight.

And still Alfor refused to budge.

It was only later that Red learned he had put Allura into stasis, ordered the paladins to take their lions and flee, to go into hiding, to await a new generation.

All she knew was that Keturah was furious, her ire burning hotter today than it had for _years_. She marched into Red's hangar like a storm condensed into mortal flesh, swept up Red's ramp, settled in her seat and took up the controls in an iron grip.

Red prodded her with a wordless question, and Keturah grunted.

"We're going after Zarkon," she said. Tight. Controlled. _Angry._

Red needed to hear nothing more. They left, charging into battle, taking on Zarkon's fleet in the heart of his power. Red could not sense her sisters anywhere, but she thought nothing of it. Zarkon had killed Lealle. Zarkon had broken Black's trust.

She wanted him to pay.

Keturah remained silent through the battle. Calm, steady, and patient. (None of it right, but Red was blind, _so blind_ , and didn't see the truth until it was too late.) Even when a lucky shot dug a gouge down the length of Red's back, severed the conduit that provided power to her tail cannon, Keturah never flinched.

“Keturah!” Alfor's voice boomed through the speakers, resonating through Red's core. He had a presence like Black's, the kind that made everyone around him want to fall in line, and for a moment, Red quailed. “What is this? What are you doing?”

Keturah tightened her grip on Red's controls, twisting around a barrage of enemy fire and blasting them from behind. “What the rest of you should have done days ago,” she said coolly. Anger and satisfaction burned just beneath the surface. “What you _would_ have done if you weren’t all such damned cowards.”

(She masked it well, but she preened as her words struck home, as they rippled through the other paladins, goading them into action.)

“You cannot hope to defeat an entire army on your own,” Alfor said.

“Of course not." (Keturah was flippant, almost distracted, but her eyes never left the comms screen, and the enemy around her missed every shot.) "But we could together. _You_ can pilot the Black Lion, Alfor. You have that ability. Fly with us, help us form Voltron instead of making yourself a martyr out of fear and self-pity.”

“Keturah,” Meri said.

Keturah hardened her voice, leveled a glare at the comms screen. “Stay there if you must. Stay there and know that my death is on your heads.”

Keturah cut the connection, and Red was too caught up in the moment to see the smile she couldn't quite smother.

The paladins came. Of course they came. Red wasn't surprised, and Keturah...

(Keturah was all too proud of herself for pulling this off.)

Except...

 “We didn’t come here to fight, Keturah. Return to the castle at once.”

Exasperation lit up the bond, not as well contained as the rest of it. Perhaps Keturah was too tired to keep it up. (Perhaps she was too close to her goal to care.) “Zarkon killed Lealle, Alfor. He’s slaughtered _millions—_ our friends among them. You can’t ask me to sit back and let him ravage the rest of the universe!”

(Lies. Every word of it coated in honey and carefully constructed to hit the paladins where it hurt.)

(But this time, her silvered tongue failed her.)

“Paladins," Alfor said with a sigh, "bring her in.”

Keturah's mind went quiet, and this time it wasn't careful control or the heat of battle or whatever meditation she'd learned to shield herself from Red. It was shock, pure and simple, and it made Red falter, too.

"What?"

Blue, Yellow, and Green surrounded Red, weapons charged and ready--aimed at Red instead of at the enemy. Hurt thudded through her, slowed her. Keturah's grip had gone slack on the controls, and Red couldn't think to move herself, though the enemy was all around her still.

She didn't understand.

“So that’s how it’s going to be?" Keturah asked, a hatred in her voice Red had never heard before. Her hand dropped from the controls, slipped to the comms panel, hit a button. A burst of code, pre-loaded into the comms, swept through her system and left as a transmission. "Anyone who disagrees with you gets annihilated, even your own paladins? Quiznak, Alfor! Lealle was right—you’re as bad as Zarkon!”

Red's mind hardly followed Keturah's speech. It chased the transmission, currents of confusion slowly dawning into horror.

The transmission...

It wasn't meant for the paladins, or for another ally.

It went, instead, to Zarkon.

Suspicion welled inside her, turning slowly to horror, to the very beginnings of rage.

Then a flash, a laser punching a hole through the base of her neck. It missed the cockpit by a hair's breadth, but Keturah was ready for it, killing the comms as the blast burned through Red's main power conduit. She lost control of herself, her consciousness retracting back toward the crystal that had her tethered here.

Her last memory was of Keturah, scowling as a tractor beam caught them, her disgust for the other paladins leaving a sour taste in Red's mouth.

* * *

The storm cleared.

It was strange, how distinct the storm was. Its approach, and when it fizzled out, clouds dispersing and letting the hazy light of the Heart back in--both moments stood out sharp and lucid in his mind. But in between...?

There had been memories, and pain, but the details were hard to come by.

Red's guilt colored everything, so deep and profound he could taste it--but that, too, was strange, because the one thing Akira knew he didn't feel anywhere in that slurry of memories was guilt. Not like this. He had regrets, and he wished he could have changed things, but mostly he was _angry._  Angry at Zarkon, angry at Keturah. Angry at everyone who had ever hurt Red.

She stirred, and they saw each other--a strange separation he wasn't sure he'd experienced in...

A long time.

Time was fuzzy here, as fuzzy as the Heart itself, all clouded over and muted, like nothing was totally real.

But he saw Red, sad and tired and broken, and he wanted to protect her more than anything.

She didn't understand, but that was okay. He could be angry enough for the both of them.

A voice on the wind reached his ears, muddy and indistinct, like someone speaking underwater. He turned, scanning the haze all around him.

"Is someone there?"

For a long moment, there was no answer, just the swirling of the shadows and a rumble in the distance that warned of another storm approaching. He scanned the horizon for it, but it was still too far away, and the Heart too clouded, for him to see it.

"Akira!"

His heart skipped a beat as Matt's voice cut through the hum of white noise, as close as though they were standing side by side. Akira turned toward the sound just in time to see Matt himself emerge from the darkness, wide-eyed and sprinting full-tilt. For the first time in an eternity, Akira felt _seen,_ and the sensation roared through him like a torrent of electricity. Matt's name escaped Akira on a breath, and he reached out for him as he approached.

They passed through each other, and the wind went out of Akira, his legs threatening to buckle, thunder booming in his ears. What was this? Another memory? A dream? It had seemed so _real_.

He turned slowly, and found Matt picking himself out of the lava, his brow furrowed.

"What's happening?" Matt asked. "Akira? That is you, right?"

Lightning flashed, startling Akira, and he spun as thunder rumbled--much closer than before. He could see the beginnings of the storm now, currents in the darkness around him. It would be here soon.

"Akira?" Matt asked, his voice shaking. "Where are you? What...?"

Akira turned back toward him, and now that they were closer, he could tell that Matt was insubstantial. A dream, or maybe just a figment of Akira's imagination. He was here, though, and he could see Akira, and Akira wasn't ready to give up on that just yet.

"I'm not sure," Akira said, forcing a smile. "Doesn't matter, though. I won't stick around for long." That was the one thing he knew for sure. The things he'd seen faded quickly, but he knew he'd been tossed from one to the next in an endless string of disorientation, like a surfer held down by wave after wave, tossed and tumbled about and unable to break the surface for more than an instant.

"What?"

Akira shook his head. "Nothing. What happened? Did it work--is Red okay?"

The stricken look on Matt's face made Akira's heart skip a beat. "Is Red--? Red's fine. _You're_ the one we're worried about."

The storm was closing in quickly now, the wind already starting to pick up. It was coming for him--drawn to him because of his connection with Red, maybe. Or maybe it was intelligent, and it just had it out for Akira.

Matt was still there, and maybe he was real, maybe he wasn't, but either way, Akira couldn't stand to see him hurting like this. Couldn't stand the thought that it was Akira's fault. "Me?" he asked, shoving his unease aside and flashing his cockiest smile. "You don't need to worry about me. I've got this."

A bolt of lightning struck impossibly close, as though in challenge to Akira's boast, and he spun, heart pounding. The storm was upon him now, and he backed away, his smile slipping. _Not again._

He just wanted it to be over.

"Akira. _Akira._ "

Akira passed through Matt again, as easily as passing through a ghost, but for the first time he noticed Matt's reflection, which was clearer and more solid than anything else in this place. His skin tingled as their eyes locked, and Akira swore he felt Matt's desperation like a stone lodged in his chest.

"Win the war," he whispered, struggling not to cry. "Stop Zarkon. Stop Keturah. That's all I want."

"No. Akira--"

The storm front hit, scattering Matt's image and plunging Akira into darkness. He raised his arms to shield his face from the wind, but there was no escaping a storm like this. It was part of him, or part of Red--there was no difference between the two these days, and all Akira could do was struggle to hold onto himself as the darkness pulled him under once more.

* * *

The memories came more quickly now, crashing through each other, bleeding into each other, until there was no making sense of it at all. He was Red. He was Akira. He was young and old, innocent and jaded, bursting with energy and weary beyond belief.

He flew with Keturah, who laughed in innocent delight and stared in wonder at the stars. They chased comets and crushed invading armies and celebrated with locals, Red indulging the children who wanted to climb on her, place flowers and stones and candles on her head. Keturah drank with the locals, all too eager to boast of her accomplishments, brag about the feats they'd achieved together.

The simple joy of those days didn't diminish when memories of her captivity blended in together with them, but it did sour. It was Haggar, clawing at their bond, digging up happier memories in an attempt to--to what? Make her forget the betrayal? Did she think she could just sweep it all under the rug? Like a little laughter and the thrill of a few ancient victories could outweigh the murder of a dear friend and the way she'd tried to use him, twist him to her will?

She remembered her other paladins--the ones who had come before and the ones who had come since. Jelxa, Rhyntom, Keith and Matt. ( _Keith and Matt._ God, they must miss him so much. How could he have left them like that?)

He remembered being whole.

Voltron--not the joining of five ships, but the being who had started it all. One being, ancient and wise but otherwise not so very different from the beings who had become her paladins. It was difficult, remembering those days. The memories were hers, but she'd been someone different then, and sometimes it was hard to make sense of what she'd done. Why she'd run, hid, split herself into pieces rather than stand and fight.

(And, _oh_ , he knew how that felt. He was himself; he was Red; he was the two of them together. In this space, all three blurred together, and he _was_  all of them, all of them and more, but that didn't stop some of the memories feeling more familiar than others. It didn't stop some identities sitting right while he tried instinctively to buck others off.)

He remembered the split, the moment he and his sisters had ceased to be one and had become... different. Staring at his sisters was staring at himself, the connections still so powerful he could look through their eyes, hear their thoughts, move their bodies. That had faded, with time.

She still mourned that loss, sometimes.

Entering the lion for the first time, and hating how ill-suited it was to a life force like hers. She'd shaped it to her Quintessence, over the years. They all had. When the Alteans had built them, they'd built five identical ships, modeled after the kotha but distinguished only by their paint.

A thousand years later, and none of them were what they'd been built to be. When you were trapped in a body for all time, you _had_  to make it your own, or you'd go crazy.

(She still felt herself, the larger part of herself on Oriande, from time to time. They were still one. But the barriers of time and physical removal made it difficult for them to be truly one. Looking at the other half of herself now was like looking at her sisters as their separation stretched. They had been one, but could they really say that now?)

She chose her paladins with reckless abandon, loved them, nurtured them. She watched them grow, watched them change the universe around them.

Watched them die, too. _Felt_ them die. And then moved on. That was the hardest part to understand, he thought. The letting go. It seemed so quick each time. Only a moment to mourn, and then someone new stepped in.

(It had to be that way. They were Voltron, and Voltron could not be tied to individual lives.)

She loved them all. Even still she did. Even the ones who had died. Even the one who had betrayed her.

A billion moments. A billion sparks of pain, of beauty, of joy and darkness and fear and hope and loss and discovery and wonder and victory and guilt. They crystallized like stars in the night sky, drifting through the endless darkness of her captivity.

She was absent, but even when she was absent, she could not cease to be.

A piece of her in Oriande knew her fight was not yet over.

* * *

It was always pain that pulled Red out of her own mind. Pain when Keturah came to yank on their bond once more, pain when she only wanted to rant, or to threaten, or to implore Red to reconsider. Even after thousands of years, she still thought she had the right to ask favors of Red.

Even after all this time, she didn't seem to know whether to treat Red like an intelligent being with a will of her own, or as a piece of machinery she could reprogram to do what she wanted.

Red woke slowly this time, the pain crackling all around like static in the air, a burst conduit spilling Quintessence across her skin. She felt sick in a way the lion body usually wasn't capable of, and it took several moments to realize why.

Keturah was inside her.

Red snapped fully awake at that, and tried automatically to raise her particle barrier. It didn't work. She wasn't sure if she'd lowered it in her sleep, or if Keturah had taken advantage of her inattentiveness to sabotage it from the outside, but it was down now, and nothing Red tried could bring it up again.

Maybe that was for the best. She didn't want to trap Keturah inside her; there was no telling how much damage she could do while she forced her way out.

Shuddering, every inch of her crawling inside and out, Red turned her attention inward, trying to figure out what Keturah was doing. She was deep--down by the crystal that powered the lion and held Red's essence. Just staring at it, for now, running her hands over it.

Something bristled, a growl building in Red's throat that felt as though it came from somewhere else.

Keturah pulled out a hammer and a chisel and set the tip against a small protrusion of crystal. In the breathless moment before she brought the hammer down, something curious happened. The memory froze, Red's horror swelling in the air, the current of despair underneath so deep it paralyzed her. Part of her wished Keturah would aim her chisel deeper, cut through her core, put an end to it all.

Akira rejected the notion so violently it left him dizzy, suddenly and acutely aware of the memory for what it was. He hovered, still, just outside Red's consciousness, watching through her eyes, feeling everything she felt. He didn't have a body here, but the lion felt like an extension of himself, and to have someone crawling around inside there--someone who so vehemently _did not belong_ \--made him want to tear his way to open space and open all the airlocks.

But this was a memory, and however much he felt as though he were the Red Lion, he couldn't will her to move.

Keturah's hammer came down with a tiny _plink_  that split Akira to the core. He recoiled, nausea and fury roiling through him, making his blood boil. This was _wrong_. This was--

He wanted to watch that woman _burn._

Red purred, the sound pain and fear and stress, compacted into the tiniest of sounds that quavered in the air as Keturah chipped off a tiny fragment of her crystal. Akira almost-- _almost_ \--managed to manifest on the catwalk before her as she turned to go. He felt a little more solid just for the blaze of rage in his core, and his perspective split away from Red's for a moment, becoming something more like sight as he was used to than the spatial awareness a lion had of her interior.

Then Keturah swept through him, and his head spun, and the next thing he knew she was outside, and Red heaved and strained until her particle barrier snapped into place around her.

Akira was more focused on Keturah. She left the hangar quickly, taking the crystal fragment back to her lab. Red's connection to her was weak, and with Red actively trying to block her out, it was even harder to follow her progress--but he could follow the fragment of Red much better.

It led him toward another, brighter spot of Red's Quintessence, and he swallowed down another wave of helpless fury. This must have been after her last trip to Oriande. After she'd attacked Red's spirit, stolen a piece of her.

Another memory tried to interject itself into this one. The streets of New Altea, smoking and littered with rubble. A kotha-like creature that triggered something pained and vengeful in Red. That was the first time she'd entered him, and he'd always struggled to remember what happened--but the kotha-creature stuck in his mind. Now that he'd seen Red's true form, he could see how it was shaped to imitate her--and how woefully short it fell. It was a weak copy, unskilled and flawed from the very start, but it used fragments of Red's being, and that alone made him wish he could remember what Red had done to it.

Was Keturah trying to build that abomination in this memory? Or did that come later, after she'd given up on bending the real deal to her will?

It wasn't fair. He wanted to find her, to fight her. Rip pieces of her out, like she'd ripped pieces from Red, from Meri, from Takashi and Matt and Val. She left people bloodied and broken and moved on like it was nothing, like _they_  were nothing. Just once, he wanted her to be on the other end.

A note rang out, slicing through his concentration. Vision faded to darkness, the memories receding. He felt Red--in the memory, yes. Red herself, and the two fragments of her Keturah had taken.

But also something else.

Not something else. The same pull that had drawn him toward those fragments. The same resonance that told him what they were.

Red, only not.

He opened his eyes and saw the Red Lion.

Saw the kotha creature from New Altea.

Saw something new, something twisted.

_Dark Red._

_How **dare**  she?_

Akira didn't know what this was--a memory or a vision or reality, but he knew that the thing he was staring at was an affront worse than the creature he'd killed on Oriande. He threw himself at it, and was surprised when the lion responded, slamming into Dark Red with enough force to jar Akira's teeth.

(How strange that he _had_  teeth to jar. Maybe that was just another part of this dream.)

He growled, lunging again, and Red recoiled--not the lion, but the mind he shared it with. They saw each other in that moment, Red aching and uncertain, shrinking from the monstrosity before her, Akira's rage swelling even more when he saw what it had done to her. This wasn't what Red should be. She was a wildfire, untamed, unstoppable.

How _dare_  Keturah do this to her?

Akira growled, the sound rising from the pit of his stomach and expanding to fill every inch of him. His hands curled into fists and met resistance. Chairs. Two of them.

"Red? What's wrong?"

"That _thing,_ " he said, unable to tear his eyes away from Dark Red even when he felt his paladins' gaze on him. "That-- _abomination_."

The weight of other minds turned toward him, curious, concerned. Could they all feel his rage?

_Good._

"What about it?"

For some reason, it was Allura's voice that snapped him out of it. Not Matt's question, not Keith's presence in the corner of his mind. They were a part of him; expected. There was nothing jarring about the way they moved in time with him, the way they felt his anger and responded in kind.

 _Allura,_ though, was different. Paladins changed, while the bond remained the same, but _Allura_  was someone Red had always known, ever since she was a child. She featured in so many memories--but only in a few was she a part of the Voltron bond.

Akira drew in a breath, his hands clenching the seats more tightly than ever as the world reoriented around him.

This wasn't a memory.

This was the present, and all around him were his friends.

Keith and Matt and Takashi--he could sense him together with Allura, off in Black but close enough and watchful enough for Akira to sense him.

Tears sprang to his eyes unexpectedly, a tsunami of homesickness tearing through him. He missed them. The thought thudded through him, over and over. _I miss them.  
_

And they missed him, too. He knew that as fact, and he wanted so desperately to talk to them.

_Not here. Not now. Not yet._

He swallowed, straining to catch hold of his scattered thoughts. Allura had asked a question. What question? What was he doing here?

Red stirred within him, melancholy and sympathetic, reaching out to him as though to bundle him away, shield him from the pain.

At a flash of red from outside, he remembered himself, and the fury began to stoke itself in his chest once more. "It's me," he said, his voice breaking at the lie. (Not a lie. Not the truth, but not a lie. He and Red _were_  one. On some level, they still were, and he couldn't afford to distract his friends by announcing his presence. Not until he knew if this would last.) He seized his anger in both hands and forced himself to continue, drawing on his anger and on Red's pain at the same time. She wanted them to know this, too. "That _bitch_ used _me_ to make her monster. She didn't come to Oriande to kill me--she came to _steal_ me, to recreate me as her slave. And she succeeded."

The rage that had started in him flowed outward to Keith and Matt, and he let it. It would blind them, for the moment. Keep them from realizing what was happening. Keep them focused. They needed that.

When Takashi ordered them to stop, though, Akira couldn't fight it. Not when he could hear the plea in his brother's voice. There was more going on here than Akira could see, more that Takashi needed them to accomplish than destroying a single abomination.

(He explained it, but the words swirled around in a senseless slurry. Keith and Matt were calming down, and Akira had spent his energy. His head spun, his limbs growing heavy, and when Shiro called for them all to form Voltron, Akira at last let go. The other lions would bolster Red, and Akira's presence would only distract them all from whatever it was Takashi wanted them to do.)

As he faded, he reached out for Red--still cowering, still shaken. He willed her to be strong, to trust him. He would be back, if she needed him again.

He wouldn't let Keturah hurt her anymore.

* * *

Akira slept again--but it felt more like true sleep now than ever before. The memories skittered over the surface of his dreams, flashes of images and emotions too distant to disturb him.

It felt like _rest_ , which wasn't something he'd had in... However long it had been since he'd given himself up to Red.

The next time he opened his eyes, he was back in the Heart, his vision clearer than the last several times he'd been here. Gone were the shadows dogging the corners of his vision. Gone was the mist that obscured the shape of the land. He stood on a smooth black scar in the lava field--obsidian, or something like it, polished to a mirror shine and glowing with the light of the lava all around.

He breathed deep and tipped his head back. Far over head, through the wispy, mist-like cloud cover, he spotted a few stars, and he smiled.

Red was still there, a warmth inside to match the heat coming off the lava, but the brush of her mind no longer threatened to pull his off its tracks and into a labyrinth of borrowed memories.

He blinked, and for an instant he was back on Oriande, his hand raised and Red's nose nuzzled up against it--the moment before they fused. Time around him had stopped, Matt's face crumpled with realization, Keith's eyes wide with fear. Nyma held them both back, but even she had screwed her eyes shut, as though she didn't want to watch.

"Is this selfish?" he asked aloud.

Red dropped her nose, ducking her head under his hand so his fingers wound up tangled in the fur at the nape of her neck and her forehead came to rest against his shoulder.

He turned to her, longing thrumming in his chest. He breathed through it, trying to shove it away. "This isn't what I offered you."

She purred, lifting her head to nuzzle his face. _**It's okay,**_ she said. _**We were wrong.**_

He took her face in his hands, searching her eyes, her mind, for resentment. "Are you sure?"

 _ **We can work with this,**_ she promised him. _**Your family needs you as much as my sisters need me.**_ She laughed, turning her head away. _**I knew that, too. That's why I made you shatter my crystal. I thought they would lose you, and I couldn't let that happen. But this part of me didn't understand.**_

"Red..."

 _ **I understand now.**_ She nudged him again with her head. _**And I'm sorry. But you've found yourself. I was afraid to hope you might, but now you've done it... Now that you've remembered yourself, maybe I can make things right.  
**_

"And you?"

_**Don't worry about me.** _

His lips quirked into a smile. "Like I can stop. I don't want you to disappear."

 _ **I won't,**_  she promised. _**I've still got things to do.**_  She flicked her head, hitting him under the jaw, and he stumbled back, laughing. _**Now go. I've taken enough time from you.**_

He rubbed his jaw, still smiling, and caught her eye. "Okay," he said. He paused, then threw his arms around her neck. "Thank you."

She only purred louder, the sound rumbling in his chest, lulling him to sleep one last time.

* * *

The only way he could describe it was a settling. Like he'd been on his feet all day and finally had a chance to sit down. Like an old house groaning. There was an echo of a purr in the silence around him--more a memory than anything, but it warmed him, left his muscles pliant and relaxed. He breathed a sigh, and it seemed as though he'd tossed off a tremendous weight.

He opened his eyes to a dark room. Red-tinted lights along the baseboards and the edges of instrument panels traced the shape of the space, and he recognized it with a sense of detachment. The Red Lion's cockpit? That didn't seem right.

...He wasn't sure why.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his cot. They felt too heavy, lined with lead and moved by muscles that had fallen into disuse. Which was odd because his head seemed to be filled with helium and trying to float right off his shoulders. He pressed a hand to his face and felt moisture there. Sweat. Why was he sweating?

Why was he _here_? The last thing he remembered was...

The last thing he remembered was _Red_. Just.. Just Red. Fully present and impossibly intimate and too much to conceive of anything else. Her purr still rattled in his chest, a countermelody to the racing beat of his heart. But before that--before the memories, before the dreams, before drifting in and out of his own self...

Oriande.

He got the sense that Oriande had been some time ago, if he hadn't simply dreamed it up, and he swayed where he sat, a wave of vertigo making him queasy. He fumbled for a light, a lamp, a switch along the wall. He found nothing, but the light came on just the same, searing his eyes as the cockpit lit up like a sunny day. He pressed the heel of his hand to his eye. When he pulled it away, he noticed it was shaking. _He_ was shaking.

He had the distinct impression that his body remembered something he couldn't. Something big. It wasn't a pleasant feeling to have, and he rubbed his hands briskly up and down his face, both to try to stop their shaking, and to wake himself up. It didn't work on either account.

The silence of the cockpit only made everything worse, so he forced himself to stand and stumble to the ramp. It was like his feet didn't remember how to walk, or at least didn't want to listen to him, and the way the ramp lowered automatically beneath his feet didn't help. He fell against the wall, winced again when Red's mouth opened onto the glaringly white lights of the hangar.

He caught himself and leaned his shoulder against the wall just inside Red's mouth, hugging himself and squinting against the light. He didn't think he was cold, but his teeth chattered like he was, and he rubbed his hands up and down his arms as he shuffled across the hangar, out the door, down an unfamiliar corridor. He spared no thought for the doors he passed, didn't slow until he found an elevator and slumped against the wall inside.

He thought of the floor he wanted, willed his hand to find the button. (He didn't think it _did_ , but the elevator whirred to life, and the hum of it against his skull was comforting and familiar, so he let it be.)

Out into another hall, past unmarked doors. He knew who slept behind them; he should have, but the names eluded him. It didn't matter, though. The one he wanted was further down.

The lights were pleasantly low here, tinted red as a favor to sleepy paladins who might venture out in search of food or company. A standard feature of the castle, but the red tint had been a concession; some species were more sensitive to blue light than others. (He supposed he was one of those species, wasn't he? That seemed right.) Well, god bless whoever had had the idea about the lights, at any rate.

He picked up the pace as his eyes began to close. It was dangerous, moving this fast when he was having so much trouble staying awake. He could feel himself pitching forward, stumbling just to keep up with his own momentum, but he didn't want to stop. He didn't think he could.

He practically threw himself against the door he wanted, slapping his hand against the metal and then freezing, utterly blanking on what came next. Should he knock? Just walk in? Whose room _was_ this?

The sound of a person falling against the door was evidently enough to wake whoever was inside, though, because there was a rustle, a faint murmur of voices, and then footsteps, light and shuffling. The door opened, and he very nearly avoided falling on top of Matt.

Matt.

Was that who he'd come to see?

No.

"Sorry," he said, his own voice sounding hollow to his ears. "Am I interrupting something?"

The sleep cleared out of Matt's gaze, and he frowned, pushing them both out into the hall and closing the door behind him. "It’s two o’clock in the goddamn morning, Red. What are you doing here?"

Red?

The name set his head whirling, the hallway tilting at a dangerous angle that made him stumble, one hand flailing for the wall as he lost track of which way was up. He was queasy again, worse than before, and he pressed one cold, sweaty, shaking hand to his face, wishing he could make the spinning stop.

"Red?"

Matt's irritation was gone as quickly as it had come, and he stepped forward, wrapping an arm around his back to support him.

"Matt...?" His voice didn't sound like his own, the way his body didn't feel like his own, the way the castle didn't feel like the one he'd slept in the night after he'd murdered Red. "Matt, I don't know what's happening."

"What do you--?" Matt stopped himself, shifted so he was taking more of their shared weight. "Start at the beginning, okay? What's going on? Did something happen?"

He laughed, but even that didn't come out right. "I don't know. I think so? I don't remember what."

Matt was frowning now, his brow furrowed, his grip tight. "Was it a dream?"

He shook his head. He didn't remember having a dream. Unless all of this was a dream. It felt enough like one, unsettling in a way he couldn't put a name to, surreal despite being supremely mundane.

"Are you hurt?"

He shook his head again. He could barely feel his body, and it didn't want to respond to his commands, but he thought he would have known if he was injured.

Matt heaved a sigh, tired and exasperated, and just the slightest bit irritated, again. "Well, you've got to give me _something_ here, Red. I'm not a mind reader."

"Why do you keep calling me that?"

The question slipped out before he knew what he was asking, but as soon as it did, it struck a chord in him, shocking him into clarity for a fraction of a second before the vertigo crept back in. Why _was_ Matt calling him Red? Why hadn't he protested before? It wasn't like he'd forgotten who he was, or anything. It just... it felt right, him being Red.

He lifted his head, his eyelids drooping as he stared into Matt's wide eyes.

"I think I missed something. Or maybe I made something up. I don't know. I don't..."

"Holy shit," Matt breathed. Then: "Shiro?" Matt pulled away, saw him sway, stepped back in. " _Takashi._ "

His voice never rose far above a whisper, but they were still just outside the door, and Takashi must have woken the same time Matt had. In seconds, he was at the door, wide awake and spoiling for a fight, as always. You could wake him up in the dead of night, and he'd be good to go in a snap.

"Takashi." The name fell from his lips on a breathless wheeze, and he tipped forward, falling against Takashi in a bumbling, boneless, disjointed flop.

Takashi froze, shifting. Looking over his head at Matt. Something passed between them, something he couldn't hope to understand, as scrambled as he was. He was still floating an inch above his own skin, clutching at a warm body just to try to make himself feel... something. _Anything._

Slowly, Takashi's arms went around him. "...Akira?"

At the sound of his name, something in Akira's chest finally settled into place. He closed his eyes, breathed out, dug his fingers into Takashi's back. "I missed you," he said, and maybe he was crazy, maybe he'd dreamed it all, and he'd only seen Takashi a few hours ago.

But it was true. He'd missed his brother. He felt it in his bones.

And he thought, from the way Takashi suddenly crushed him to his chest, that Takashi felt it, too.


	29. A Way Forward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Akira's back! Need I say more?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO sorry this is up a day late. There's no reason for it; I straight-up forgot yesterday was Monday lol. Anyway, enjoy!

"Akira?"

"Hmm?"

"You still with me?"

"Mmm."

Matt watched the twitch of Shiro's brow, waited for him to push harder, but he seemed not to know what to do. It had been ten minutes since Akira showed up a their door, scrambled and bleary-eyed and hardly seeming to know where he was. Shiro had all but carried him to the bed, Akira already so boneless he just flopped wherever Shiro put him.

Shiro and Matt had both tried to get some answers out of him since, but they'd had no luck, leaving them with endless questions and a simmering unease. Well. _Matt_ had endless questions and a simmering unsease. Maybe it was enough for Shiro that Akira was back.

Akira had hardly spoken, though. One and two words answers, sometimes. More often just grunts and hums.

Matt and Shiro were starting to worry.

"I'm sorry," Shiro said, rubbing his hand up and down Akira's back. He'd already taken his prosthetic off for the night, and he hadn't bothered to put it back on, but Matt could tell he was starting to regret that. He kept trying to hug Akira tighter, but he could only squeeze so much with one arm. "I know you're tired; I just need to know that you're okay. You're not hurt, are you?"

Akira grunted, which might have meant he was fine. Or it might have meant he was dying and couldn't manage words.

(He was probably fine.)

Shiro sighed. "I don't know, maybe we should take you to the infirmary. Coran can do a scan, and that way we'll know whether you need to spend some time in a pod."

Akira stiffened so suddenly it made Shiro jump. Matt sat up, wincing at the way Akira's fingers dug into Shiro's arms. He shook his head, breathing turning shallow.

Shiro struggled to push himself up and mostly failed. He refused to let go of Akira, for a start, and that meant he didn't have any leverage. He stared down at Akira just the same, eyes wide and arm curling around Akira's shoulders.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, it's okay. What's wrong?"

Akira shook his head again, trembling, clinging to Shiro. If Matt didn't know better, he would have said Akira was having a panic attack--but he'd never had problems with anxiety before. As fucked up as they all were, Akira, at least, had escaped that particular brand of wartime fun.

Not so much anymore, it seemed.

He was whispering something, the words hitching and repeating, but with his face crushed against Shiro's shoulder, it was impossible to make out what he was saying until, with a gasping, shuddering sob, he curled tighter on himself and turned his head just far enough to the side for the words to come through.

"Don't put me under again," he said. "Please. I can’t do it again."

Shiro traded alarmed looks with Matt, who rolled over, bringing his hand up to rest on Akira's arm. "We won't put you under," Matt promised. "If you don't want to go in a pod, we aren't going to force you. We don't even know that it would do anything."

"I just want to know you're going to be okay," Shiro said. "You've been gone so long--"

His voice broke, and Matt dropped his head onto his shoulder, stretching his arm out across Akira's back alongside Shiro's and twining their fingers together.

"He's here," Matt said. "That's a start."

Akira didn't lift his head. If anything, he tightened his grip on Shiro, his entire body shaking underneath Matt's arm. Bit by bit, he quieted, his hiccuping breath slowing as Shiro continued to rub his back. When he seemed to have calmed down, Shiro bent his head down and whispered something, but Akira only shook his head.

"Can you... talk?"

Shiro frowned. "About what?"

Akira shoulders jumped. "Anything. I just want to hear your voice."

Matt's throat constricted at the desperation in Akira's words, but Shiro seemed comforted for hearing them. He relaxed a little, letting his head fall back onto his pillow. "Okay, uh... You mind if I rant about Coalition garbage? Cause that's mostly what I've been doing lately."

Matt's lips twitched, and Akira only hummed. As Shiro wound up to a tirade, starting with some of the context Akira had missed while he was, well, _Red_ , Matt squeezed Shiro's wrist and rolled out of bed, using the motion to cover the act of switching off their alarm clock. They'd already been up late, and Akira had knocked at quarter past two--and somehow, Matt doubted Shiro would be falling back to sleep any time soon.

He swiped his comm as he headed for the bathroom, sending a quick message to Allura letting her know they'd miss breakfast and not to worry. He could fill her in on the details tomorrow, just so long as she didn’t come knocking at five thirty.

He filled a glass with water before returning to the bedroom, passing it to Shiro, who nodded his thanks. He was fully in rant mode now, gesturing occasionally with his hand but always returning it to Akira's back promptly, like he was afraid Akira might slip away if he didn't keep a good hold on him.

Akira relaxed a little more with every passing moment, his breathing slowing further as Shiro kept talking. Matt almost thought he'd fallen asleep, but when Shiro paused in his rant and reached for the cutout shelf in the wall above his head, where he'd set the water glass, Akira cracked his eye open.

He watched Shiro maneuver the cup, holding it by the rim so he didn't spill and bracing it on his shoulder as he adjusted his grip and took a long drink.

"Takashi?" Akira asked, his voice heavy with sleep. Matt had to wonder again what had happened to him to tire him out like this.

Shiro put the cup back on the shelf and rubbed Akira's back. "Yeah?"

"This is real, right? 's not just another dream?"

Shiro looked stricken, but he gave Akira a squeeze. "Of course it's real," he whispered.

"'kay. I figured. 's been too long for anything else. It's just hard to tell sometimes."

"Akira?"

"Hmm?"

Shiro hesitated, and Matt curled up against him, threading his arms around Shiro's. "What happened to you? If you don't mind talking about it."

Akira was quiet for a moment, and then he lifted his head, propping his chin on Shiro's chest. "Not much to tell. Our memories were all suzzled together, and I got caught up in it."

"Suzzled?" Shiro asked.

Akira wiggled one arm free of his death grip on Shiro and smacked his shoulder. "Shut up. You try reliving ten thousand years and we'll see how coherent you are."

Matt laughed, but his mouth had gone dry. Shiro couldn't even manage to feign mirth. _Ten thousand years_. Was that what it meant to be connected to Red like Akira had been? There was so much they didn't know about this, but--ten _thousand_ years. Matt couldn't even comprehend that much time. And Akira had _lived_ it? No wonder he was so tired.

Akira's own half-smile faded, and he dropped back down against Shiro, turning his head to the side. "Sorry. Shouldn't’ve said that."

Shiro scowled. "Don't apologize. You had to live with it; I at least want to know about it so I can help you."

"Soon," Akira said. "Don't think I'm up for that tonight."

With a sigh, Shiro nodded, once more rubbing Akira's back. "Fair enough. Do you want to talk about something else? Or we could put on a movie."

"You could just keep talking about the political bullshit."

"You _want_ to hear about the political bullshit?"

Akira pursed his lips, eyes closed. "I'm working myself up to snarky commentary. Give me time."

Shiro huffed out a laugh--the kind of soft, surprised laugh Matt had heard far too rarely these past weeks. Akira, half asleep as he was, didn't react to it, but Matt leaned his head against Shiro's shoulder, hoping neither of them noticed the way he'd suddenly choked up. Shiro was soft and warm beside him, almost as relaxed as Akira and breathing a deep, slow rhythm that lulled Matt. He tried, at first, to stay awake, listening to Shiro's considerably less-aggravated-than-usual ranting and Akira's grunts that slowly changed into half-hearted curses and then muttered insults.

Eventually, though, he lost the battle with sleep and drifted off to the sound of Shiro's muffled laughter.

* * *

_We're not going to make it to breakfast tomorrow. Don't worry--it's nothing bad. I'll explain in the morning._

Allura scowled at the small, trim words on the screen before her, wishing Matt would have taken the time to do a little explaining _now_ instead of making her wait. Her first thought, of course, was the nightmares. They were rare these days, but both Shiro and Matt had had issues with them in the past--more likely Shiro this time, if Matt was the one reaching out to Allura.

But Matt had said it was nothing bad. Did he mean that the nightmares had been more tame tonight? Or something else entirely? She couldn't imagine Shiro agreeing to sleep in--he'd probably call it shirking his duties--for anything less than the end of the world.

Grumbling under her breath, Allura set the comm back on her bedside table and went to get dressed. Meri was still asleep, or nearly so. She stretched until her toes poked out from under the blanket, sprawled across the entire mattress, one arm flung over the pillows. Her hair splayed out around her head like a crimson starburst, falling artfully across her face, and Allura couldn't resist bending down to plant a kiss on Meri's cheek.

She wrinkled her nose, cracked an eye, and lifted a hand in a sloppy wave as she grunted a farewell.

Smiling, Allura ducked out of the room and headed down to Black's hangar. It was strange, doing this alone. The morning and evening meditations had become such a constant in her life that any change to the routine felt like an upheaval. She lingered for a long moment in the doorway, unsure if she was waiting for Shiro to show up after all or debating whether she should just skip it for today.

In the end, she went through with it, because half an hour of reflection with just her and Black was still a worthwhile endeavor...

And maybe Black would know what had happened with Shiro last night.

They normally started off quiet, Allura and Shiro both a little groggy, content to ease into the day. Not so this morning. Matt's message had fast-tracked Allura to 'wide awake and bursting with unanswered questions,' and she'd hardly set foot in Black before she was swept away to the Heart.

She landed in the shallow sea, the stars glittering all around her. So Black was awake, too, then. Normally they would have started deeper than this. Was it Allura's restlessness that had pulled them out of sync, or-- No.

_No._

Allura hardly had a chance to process the Heart around her before a wave of emotion hit her--an awful lot of it, and all at once. Uncertainty; a tiny taste of sorrow; eagerness, almost giddiness, like Black had a secret she couldn't wait to share. And riding underneath it all, a deep and pervasive satisfaction.

Allura frowned, turning a slow circle until she spotted Black among the stars.  She was, for just that first glimpse, the lion, towering and unflappable. Then Allura got a better look at her, and she was nearly bowled over by the fluffy black house cat that came charging toward her, leaping up into her arms with abandon. Allura caught her, albeit a little clumsily, and staggered back with a surprised laugh.

"What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"

Black _purred_ , raising her head to butt at the underside of Allura's chin, all affection and energy that wormed its way under Allura's skin, drawing out another laugh and prompting her to return Black's nuzzling.

 _ **It's Red,**_ Black said. _**And Akira. They've found their balance.**_

Shock rippled through Allura, bringing her up short and very nearly causing her to drop Black into the water. She held on, but only just, and stared down at the cat in her arms, who went on purring, regarding her with a smug sort of satisfaction.

"What did you say?" Allura asked, breathless-if it was possible to be so in the Heart. "Akira...?"

Cats couldn't smile, but Allura swore she saw Black smile as the news washed over her. _**He's back.**_

"And that's why--?"

She didn't bother to finish the question. Of course that was why Matt had messaged her. Akira turning up on their doorstep in the dead of night--they probably hadn't gotten any sleep at all.

A thousand questions battered at her mind, all competing for her attention. How was Akira doing? Did his fusion with Red leave any lasting impacts? How was _Red_ , for that matter? Black wouldn't be this happy if anything bad had happened to her, surely, but there had been that note of sorrow mixed in with all the rest. What if they'd only traded places, and now Red was as far out of reach as Akira had been for the last few weeks?

She itched to go to them, to see for herself that everyone was all right, but it was still early, _painfully_  so. Hardly anyone else would be awake at this hour, however well they'd slept last night. She should wait. But how long? Was an hour-- An hour wasn't enough time, surely. But two? Three? Or should she wait for them to come to her? _Could_  she wait that long?

She could feel Black laughing at her, but it was softened by the way she kept rubbing against Allura's chin, against her cheeks. _**Give it time,**_  she admonished. _**Akira will still be there when you see him.**_

Allura made a face at the cat, her ears flaming, though she certainly had no right to pretend to be surprised that Black knew what she was thinking.

She knew, too, that there was no chance of meditation this morning, not in the wake of news like that. Black withdrew slowly, her purrs still filling Allura up, and the starscape around them petered out, until Allura was dropped unceremoniously back into her body, still framed in the entrance to Black's cockpit.

Black gave her a mental nudge toward the door. _**Go on,**_  she said. _**A few of the others are up. Perhaps you can distract each other.**_

As though Allura could just _dump_  this on them all. Start the day off by declaring that Akira was alive and well once more, though she had no proof of any such thing.

Black nudged her again, this time with a touch more exasperation. _**Keith could use the reassurance, if nothing else. He**_ _ **knows something has changed, but he doesn’t know what. You should tell him before he drives himself mad.**_

* * *

Matt woke slowly, squinting against the blue-tinted light around him.

 _Blue_ -tinted?

He opened his eyes, and almost immediately regretted it. It wasn't bright in here, by any means, but the lights around the baseboards had turned to a bluish hue--a bluish hue that normally indicated daytime, where it faded to a soft red at night. He stared at the ceiling, the blue prickling the corners of his eyes, and wondered why their alarm hadn't gone off. If they'd had some sort of a power outage and overslept, Shiro was going to flip.

A moment later, it all came rushing back, and Matt narrowly stopped himself from launching up out of the bed. (Probably for the best; he'd turned off the alarm so Shiro and Akira could _sleep_ , not get jostled awake by his early morning exuberance.)

He did push himself up, though--more gently than his first impulse--and turned to look at the twins. They'd fallen asleep at some point, but Matt wouldn't hold out hope that that point hadn't been _after_  the rest of the castle was already starting to get up and get ready for the day. Akira was still flopped on top of Shiro, not moved even an inch from where he'd landed last night. His arms were still wrapped around Shiro, disappearing under him, and Shiro had his arm wrapped tightly around Akira's shoulders. Even asleep, he seemed to be trying to keep Akira from slipping away.

Matt smiled, and he couldn't resist pulling out his phone and snapping a picture--they were just so cute it was either that or sit here cooing at them until they woke up.

He stared at the picture instead as he rolled out of bed, tiptoeing to the bathroom. The clock on his phone said he'd only overslept by about two hours--a massive amount in the world of Takashi Shirogane, but honestly not as long as Matt might have expected. Allura and Shiro would normally already be off doing Coalition stuff by now, but some of the other paladins would only just be finishing breakfast. Pidge might not even be conscious yet.

Halfway through his morning routine, a sudden, horrible thought occurred to him, and it doused his good mood like a bucket of ice water.

What if Akira wasn't really back?

He didn't doubt that last night had happened, by any means. It was all too vivid in his mind, and the sight of Shiro and Akira cuddled up together on the bed in the other room was proof enough that he hadn't dreamed it....

But what if it wasn't permanent? Akira had found his way back to the surface, found a way to talk to them, yes. But what if it didn't last? There had been moments, over the last few weeks, where Matt had almost been able to convince himself that Akira was in there, present enough for Matt to see him--but he'd always faded before Matt could convince himself he wasn't just imagining things.

Maybe he _was_ just imagining things all those times. But how did any of them know that Akira turning up last night meant that he was back to stay?

Grabbing a sweatshirt from the closet, Matt hugged it close and padded back to the bed, pausing with his hand an inch from Akira's shoulder. He shouldn't wake him. Not when he'd gone through all the trouble of making sure he'd be able to rest uninterrupted.

But how did he just walk away, _not knowing_  whether that was Akira sleeping there or Red?

"Need something?" Akira murmured, his voice slurred with sleep. One eye cracked open--still gray--and Matt almost dropped to the floor.

"No," Matt said. "Sorry. Just..." He pursed his lips. "Sorry. I was trying to be quiet."

Akira snorted softly, shifting to get more comfortable and tucking his head against Shiro's chest. "Wasn't the noise," he said. "You seemed worried."

Akira didn't appear to want to elaborate on that, and Matt figured now wasn't the time to go digging anyway, not when Akira was probably too tired to give anything approaching a coherent answer, but it did stick in his head, a puzzle begging to be picked apart. Akira had always been tied to Matt and Keith, ever since he'd become their adjunct, but it had never manifested as Akira sensing their emotions--certainly not sensing them strongly enough to rouse him from a dead sleep.

Was this a normal part of his developing adjunct bond, or a side effect of merging with Red? Matt suspected he knew the answer, and he didn’t like it.

Matt forced himself to take a step away from the bed, hugging his sweatshirt to his chest and smiling at the slumbering pair. "I'm fine, Akira. Don't worry about me, just get some rest. I'll bring breakfast in a little while."

Akira hummed faintly, a sound that might have been nothing more than a sigh of contentment as he settled back in to sleep.

The door closed behind Matt, and he pulled his sweatshirt over his head as he headed for the elevator. His stomach was starting to wake up now, and it was telling him he'd missed breakfast by two hours. He wondered if there was anything good to choose from today, or if it was more of the same goo and off-brand oatmeal.

What he wasn't expecting, when he stepped into the dining hall at half-past-you're-late-to-training, was for the entire team to be gathered there, grouped around one end of the table and sprawled on the floor. Allura and Coran had screens up all around them, and tablets scattered across the table top, like they had brought their planning meetings to breakfast and were perfectly content to conduct the day's business from here. Val was seated on the floor in the corner, a tablet propped up against her legs, Lance flopped on his back beside her and staring at the ceiling, Nyma up and pacing. Keith, Meri, Hunk, and Shay were seated at the table with Allura and Coran, seemingly caught halfway between joining in on their work and watching the spectacle of the Blues continuously winding themselves up over whatever it was Val kept reading aloud to the other two. Something to do with the Vkullor, he thought? Even Pidge was there, half asleep but typing away at something on their laptop, Karen seated beside them. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop and stared at something on the far wall, not bothering to pretend she was paying attention to any of what was going on around her.

Matt slowed in the doorway, frowning, wondering whether Akira had decided to turn up again on the one day the rest of the castle lost its mind. "Uh..."

Nyma was the first to spot him, turning on her heel at the end of one long arc of pacing around the buffet table still spotted with leftovers from breakfast--mostly oatmeal and fruit, yes, but Matt was pretty sure he saw pancakes, too, and lots of them. Had Hunk been stress baking again or something?

Nyma froze at the sight of him, her eyes going wide, her mouth dropping open like she was about to say something. No words came out, though, but her stiffness caught Lance's attention. He tipped his head back, still starfished on the ground, and frowned at her upside down before turning to follow her gaze.

When he spotted Matt, he leaped to his feet, letting out a cry somewhere between an accusation and triumph that made everyone else in the room jump, Val's tablet spilling from her lap with a clatter. "Matt!"

Suddenly every eye in the room turned Matt's way, each of them sharp and curious and waiting for answers to questions Matt hadn't yet figured out. He reeled back, part of him debating simply turning around and walking from the room, pretending he didn't know they all wanted something from him. Maybe he'd go back and snag a few more hours of sleep.

Allura was faster, leaving her seat at the head of the table in the time it took for the rest of the team to get over the shock of seeing Matt there. She crossed the room in a flash, grabbing Matt's arm in both hands and spinning him around, a giddy light in her eye and a secret pulling at her lips. "Matt!" she cried.

"Allura!" He leaned back, glancing once more around the room. "What is this?"

Allura waved a hand. "We were waiting."

"Waiting?"

"For you!"

"For you _plus_ ," Pidge called, hooking their hands around the edge of the table and leaning back on their chair's rear legs.

Matt frowned. Everyone was still staring, still biting down on something--on questions, on laughter, on-- "I feel like I missed something."

Allura tugged on his arm, like she was trying to draw his attention back to her, and he obligingly turned her way. "I heard something from Black this morning," she said, her voice low, staring at him through her lashes. This was a side of Allura he hadn't seen in a _long_  time--an Allura that let herself act her age, that got giddy about gossip, that bounced on her toes with an infectious energy that even made Matt's heart start to race for reasons he didn't understand. "Something about... _Red_?"

"Ah." Suddenly it all made sense. That thing they were all tamping down on, holding back, afraid to let run loose--it was hope. They'd heard about Akira, but they hadn't seen it. They didn't know if it was true. And of course none of them could go about their day with that hanging over them. Matt smiled, lifting the arm Allura _wasn't_ holding hostage to clap her shoulder. "Yeah," he said, surprised to find himself choking up and laughing at the same time. "Akira's back."

* * *

Matt's confirmation of the news set off a bomb among the paladins, the breathless anticipation that had been building steadily over the last two hours breaking free all at once and spilling everywhere. Pidge launched to their feet with a shriek of delight and made a break for the door. Matt caught them by the hood of their sweatshirt and hauled them back.

"Woah," he cried, laughing as Pidge tried to wriggle free. "Slow down, Pidge. They're sleeping."

" _Shiro_ ," Lance said, jogging over with only a little less enthusiasm than Pidge. "Sleeping past five a.m."

Matt grinned. "He can't wake up on time if someone turns off his alarm."

Keith lingered on the edges of the knot, well aware of how easy it would be to get caught up in the current, and how quickly exuberance would turn to overstimulation. He'd woken in the middle of the night breathless, but not in a bad way. As soon as Allura had mentioned Akira, he knew what had happened. (Didn't mean he wasn't itching to go see Akira, but he'd been able to breathe in a way the others couldn't manage.)

"Allura said that was why you were late," Keith said now, circling around the edges of the crowd to reach Matt. "Late night?"

"Akira showed up at our door at, like, two o’clock in the morning. Shiro had already had a late night, and I don't even _know_ how long he and Akira were up after I passed out. Long enough that Shiro _definitely_  needs the extra sleep. And with as exhausted as Akira seemed, he probably needs it, too."

"So--you actually talked to him?" Meri asked, her voice hushed. "It's _him_?"

Matt's eyes were tearing up, and Keith felt a little of that same emotion lodge in his throat. "It's him," Matt said.

Karen suddenly broke through the ring of paladins to put an arm around Matt's shoulder, sweeping him toward the table. "All right," she said. "How about you fill us in while you eat? You must be hungry."

Matt didn't argue the point, and Keith was quick to take the seat next to him as the others all crowded around. Hunk loaded up a plate, and Matt dug in, slowly filling them all in on what had happened.

* * *

An hour later, Matt was finally willing to risk disturbing the twins by taking breakfast to them--but he was quick to name Keith as the only person allowed to come along. Keith couldn't help the bubbly feeling in his chest at the thought of seeing Akira again, _talking_ to him for the first time in months. Even the groans and only somewhat-serious boos from the other paladins couldn't pop his happy bubble, though he did feel bad for Pidge, who'd latched onto Matt's arm and gone limp, moaning aloud as Matt struggled not to let them drag him over.

"Just for now, Pidge," Matt said with a laugh. "I promise we'll come find you as soon as they're conscious. I just don't want to swarm them."

There was a nervous edge to his voice that Keith didn't think most of the others had caught, but it plucked at Keith, and his smile faded as he watched Matt wave off the others clamoring to come along. When at last they disentangled themselves, each carrying a tray Hunk had personally loaded up with fresh pancakes, sliced fruit, juice, toast, and cinnamon rolls (Akira's favorite), Keith made it only a few steps past the dining hall doors before he broke down.

"What's wrong?"

Matt turned to him, surprised, but it only lasted a moment before he caught himself and faced forward again. "Wrong? Nothing's wrong."

Keith waited in silence for Matt to spill--which he did, as expected, after only a few seconds.

"It's fine, I'm sure," Matt said. "It's just that... Akira was pretty out of it last night. Shaken up, too. I don't know if sleeping helped that, or if he's still gonna be off today. That's the real reason I didn't want everyone crowding him right now. He deserves a chance to sort of... find his balance again before he has to deal with a crowd."

Keith considered that, watching the way the juice sloshed in its cup with every step he took. That was fair enough, he supposed. He knew he always appreciated some time to breathe when he was feeling overwhelmed. It was just so strange to think of Akira being overwhelmed by _people._  He was as loud and boisterous as anyone, and he could keep up with any chaos the team could throw at him.

...Keith supposed merging with the Red Lion and disappearing for two months might have changed that.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, the elevator ride interminably long as Keith watched the floors tick by and shifted his grip on the tray. Hunk had really loaded it down--a sort of welcome-home feast, Keith supposed--and even though it wasn't _heavy_  by any objective standard, it was starting to make his wrists ache.

Then they were there, Matt balancing Shiro's tray on one hand while he knocked softly, twice, and hit the button to open the door.

It was still dark inside their room, the blue strip lights around the floor the only illumination besides the light spilling in from the hallway. Keith blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and stared at the shadow on the bed that stirred at the intrusion, groaning softly.

"Good morning!" Matt sang, waltzing into the room and hitting the lights with his elbow. They came on too bright, and he hurried to tone it down while the lump on the bed flung an arm over its eyes.

"Matt? Wha's going on?"

Keith didn't think he'd ever heard Shiro groggy--not except for maybe the first few seconds after a stay in the cryopod. This was Shiro genuinely half asleep, bleary-eyed and moaning indistinctly at the offending light.

"It's morning!" Matt said, as chipper as Keith had ever seen him. "We brought breakfast."

Shiro's moaning stopped, his arm going still. After a moment, he turned and groped for the alarm clock on the bedside table--a little out of his reach, to be perfectly honest, but Matt obligingly slid it closer with his hip, and Shiro lifted it, turning it so he could see it without moving Akira, who was still boneless on top of him.

" _Matt._ " The grogginess was gone from Shiro's voice, replaced with reproach and not a little irritation. "Why does this clock say it's already after eight?"

"Because it is," Matt said, and dropped Shiro's tray onto the bedside table with a clatter. "Good morning, sleepyhead."

Shiro glared at Matt, the expression somehow comical. His bangs stuck up at an odd angle, his cheek criss-crossed with red lines from the pillowcase, and he couldn't effectively scowl with the way Akira's hair kept drifting toward his mouth. Grinning, Matt dropped down on the edge of the mattress, leaned over, and kissed Shiro's nose.

"You turned off the alarm?" Shiro grumbled.

"You needed the sleep."

"I _certainly_ needed the sleep," Akira said before Shiro could argue. He yawned, then stretched, kicking the blanket off of him and Shiro both and raising hands out and up and directly into Shiro’s face. Akira rolled over, shifting his weight enough that he slid down to the hollow between Shiro and the wall. "I know you're some kind of superman, Takashi, but we can't _all_  run on two hours of sleep or whatever it was."

"Probably less, if you two were up as late as I think you were."

Keith shifted, keenly aware that he was still holding a tray full of food and not sure whether he should put it down so he could join the others on the bed, or whether that would be weird. Akira still wore the Altean jumpsuit Red had taken to wearing around the castle, but Shiro was dressed for sleep in a worn tank top and boxers.

Akira lifted his head suddenly, his eyes finding Keith and crinkling with a smile. A moment later, he pushed himself up on his elbows. "Is that food? That smells like food."

After a little bit of rearranging, they settled in, all of them with their backs against the wall, Shiro and Akira in the middle with Matt passing Shiro his tray before settling in beside him and Keith doing the same for Akira. He hesitated as he got settled, watching Akira and trying to convince himself this was real while also debating how close was too close to sit to someone who may or may not be re-accustomed to having a physical body.

Akira solved the problem by throwing an arm around Keith's shoulder and pulling him close. With the silent permission given, Keith twisted and squeezed Akira tight, breathing in the scent of him--no different than his scent when Red had been in control, except that there was less stress in it now.

"I missed you, too," Akira whispered, squeezing so tight Keith's lungs protested. The rest of him didn't mind in the slightest. Akira's absence had been a hole straight through him, and he could breathe easier now, with his ribs being actively crushed, than he had for the last two months.

Eventually, Keith forced himself to pull back so Akira could eat--and he ate like he hadn't touched a fork since Oriande. Shiro hadn't yet bothered with his prosthetic, so he was, admittedly, eating a little slow, but even so, Akira had cleaned his plate well before Shiro was half finished.

Shiro raised an eyebrow as he stuck a forkful of pancakes in his mouth, held the fork with his teeth, and silently slid the plate with the rest of his pancakes onto Akira's tray.

They brought Akira up to speed as he ate, skimming over the less-pleasant events--but as it happened, he remembered running into Matt in the Heart after Klennahn, and it was difficult not to let things slip once Akira started prodding for context. When they were finished, he shook his head.

"I don't believe it. I take a spiritual journey down memory lane for _two months_ and you go off and have a nice little romp on Death Island without me?"

"Less 'Death Island,' more 'Death Planet,'" Keith said.

Shiro downed the last of his juice and gave Akira a sideways look. "And to be fair, you probably only would have made things worse."

Akira lurched back, hand splayed across his chest. "Excuse _you_. When have I ever almost blown myself up?"

"If you had the power, you'd have done it." Shiro grabbed a berry from his tray and jabbed it at Akira's nose. "Don't pretend you wouldn't."

Akira held his hands up in surrender and slumped against Keith. "So is that everything? Death Island Planet, Dark Red, Sam's your adjunct--"

"Keena's gone," Matt said, grinning as Akira tossed his head back with a muttered, _Thank fuck for that._

His head dropped a moment later and he frowned. "Hang on. Does this mean I missed my chance to kick her ass?"

"There was no ass kicking, unfortunately," Matt said.

"Eh." Shiro waggled his hand. "A little bit of ass kicking. Keena came at Karen in a meeting when she got the orders to return to New Altea. Karen dropped her as clean as if they'd choreographed it. I've never seen Keena so stunned."

Keith smiled to himself, though it was hard to hold onto the satisfaction considering everything she'd done since she left. "Karen clued the Council into some things Keena had been doing in the Coalition, and they recalled her. Unfortunately, she disappeared on the way, and she might be convincing people to ditch the Coalition altogether now."

Akira wrinkled his nose, and Matt stole a slice of melon off Shiro's tray.

"On the bright side, kicking Keena to the curb opened the way for the adoption paperwork."

Akira nearly choked on his juice and stared at Matt, then at Keith, who smiled back sheepishly. "You're a Holt now?"

"I am."

Akira rounded on Shiro, punching him in the shoulder. "And you let this happen? He's supposed to be _our_  brother!"

There was no bite in his words, but he had, apparently, put some bite into his punch, and Shiro pouted as he rubbed his shoulder. "I didn't _let_  anything happen. And what, exactly, was your plan? Convince our parents to adopt a kid they've never even met? Or were _you_  going to be Keith's dad?"

Keith couldn't stop a laugh at the look of horror that flashed across Akira's face at the idea. "It's okay, Akira," he said, leaning in and dropping his voice low. "Once those two finally get married, we'll be brothers-in-law."

Akira beamed, looping an arm around Keith. “I like the way you think. Is this the part where we conspire to get them alone in compromising situations so they fall madly in love?”

Matt leveled a finger at him. “We’re already madly in love, so don’t you dare.”

Shiro suddenly stiffened, his head turning just slightly, as though chasing something the rest of them couldn't see. His gaze was distant, his brow furrowed, and Akira's mischievousness petered out at once as he reached across to take Shiro's hand.

"Hey," he said. "You still with me?"

Shiro made a face so perfectly exasperated that Keith almost thought one of them was about to get scolded for doing something reckless. Then he blinked, shook his head, and gave Akira's hand a reassuring squeeze. "Sorry. That was Sam."

Matt's breath rushed out of him. "Dad?"

Shiro nodded, and Keith could _see_  him struggling not to roll his eyes. "Yeah. He wanted to know what he could do to help us."

"Uh..." Akira raised a hand. "Did I miss the part where he stopped being a prisoner of war?"

"No," Matt said. Unlike Shiro, he had no qualms about rolling his eyes as he slumped against Shiro. "No, you did not."

"'Kay. Just wanted to check."

Shiro glanced down at Matt and smiled crookedly. "No, this is just Sam being Sam." He lifted his empty tray and passed it to Matt before working his legs free of the blankets and scooting out of bed. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it aside on his way to the bathroom. "I should probably go find Allura sometime this century. She’s going to kill me for leaving her with all the work."

Matt snorted. “Yeah, right. The only think you need to worry about is the rest of the team combusting over not getting to swarm Akira." He took Akira's tray from him and headed for the door, only pausing long enough to ask Shiro to message him where they were meeting.

Keith watched Akira as they headed out into the hall together. "You ready to be smothered?" he asked, trying to keep his tone light.

Akira shrugged and plucked at the Altean suit he was wearing. "Let me get changed, and I just might be. Good food and a good night's sleep does wonders for a scatterbrain, as it happens."

That was a funny way of putting it, like the last two months had just been Akira losing focus, getting distracted, not _almost dying_. Keith didn't know how to say so without picking a fight, though, so he let it be, walking Akira to his room and awkwardly waiting outside for several seconds, wondering if he should go find Matt. His indecision lasted long enough to hear the shower come on in Akira's room, and that decided it for him, and he wandered away feeling rather like he was living in a dream.

* * *

If sleep and food did wonders for making Akira feel sharp and focused again, a shower was equally helpful in making him feel _human_. He wasn't so far gone that he could believe Red had gone two months without showering, but he _would_ believe that she'd opted for the instantaneous Altean version rather than, you know, _actual_ showers. He shed a layer of sweat and grime, scrubbed his scalp raw, and emerged feeling like he'd sloughed off the slurry of memories that had been his world for a short eternity.

They were still there, lurking in the back of his mind, a subtle but constant awareness of the unfathomably long other life he'd inherited when he'd fused with Red.

 _She_ was still there, too, dormant for now, a warmth in his chest who had roused enough to purr all through breakfast, her contentment thrumming through him in direct parallel to his own. She made no effort to communicate, though, and while he could never totally forget what he'd done to himself, it wasn't so difficult to forget in the moment that he had a passenger inside his head. It wasn't so different from the instinct he'd had for a long while before that fateful trip to Oriande.

He pulled on his Guard uniform after he dried off, welcoming the familiar silken texture, the weight where light armor was woven into the garment--nowhere near as sturdy as the actual armor in their battle suits, but enough to be noticed. It felt _right_ , and he needed every possible reminder that he was here, he was himself, and he wasn't going away.

He still expected it to vanish at any moment, just like every other memory.

Eventually, there was nothing else he could do to delay stepping outside and going to meet the others. Shiro had messaged him with a conference room in the upper levels of the central structure and a time not quite an hour away. _We'll keep it short_ , Shiro promised in his message. _But we need to talk about next steps. If you're up for it, it might help you get caught up on the state of the war. If not, I'll see you at lunch._

Was he up for it? Akira couldn't say for sure, but he knew that he didn't want to hide. He _certainly_ hadn't come back to himself so he could stick his head in the sand and mope in his room. Maybe he would find it all too exhausting, but if he did, he could just turn in early tonight, no harm done.

And he _really_  wanted to see the rest of his friends.

Pidge was waiting for him in the hallway just outside his room, standing with their back to the wall, hands tucked behind them, rocking up on their toes and arching away from the wall so only their shoulders were touching, then dropping back down, their back hitting flush with a soft _thump_.

Akira cocked his head. "Hey. Have you just been waiting here for--?"

He cut off with an _oof_  as Pidge turned and hurled themself at him, arms locking tight around his waist, shoulders hunching as they tried to burrow into his chest. He staggered, but caught his balance before they both toppled and put his arms around their shoulders.

"Hey..."

"You're an idiot," Pidge said, their voice muffled but the words sharp. He didn't need to see their face to know they were fighting back tears, and his throat closed as he held them a little tighter. "Do you have any idea how much we missed you? I know you were trying to help, but you didn't even _tell_  anyone what you were gonna do, and then you were _gone_ , and--and-- Do you know how much it sucked to see you every day and know it wasn't really you?"

He thought of the day they'd come back from Oriande, him and Red almost in balance--how much hurt he'd seen in the others' faces, how difficult it had been to comprehend it. He cringed thinking of the things he'd said, how callous he'd been. "Yeah," he said. "I know. And I'm sorry."

They were quiet for a while, just huddled against him and squeezing his waist like a belt that had been cinched too tight. Eventually, they pulled back to stare at him, their eyes darting this way and that like they were searching for something in his face. "How much of them was you?"

Akira's gaze slid away, a lump coming to his throat. Red's memories prickled at the edges of his mind--more botched explanations, more accidental wounds dealt to his team and his family, a hurt that started from confusion and swelled to guilt and remorse and self-loathing. "I don't know," he said. "There's not a clear line between me and Red, even now. I don't think I was there for most of it. Right at the beginning, yeah, and a couple of times since. A lot of it wasn't--I was there, and I sort of knew who I was, but I was only conscious for a few minutes, and I had no clue what was going on. And with Red there, it... I don't know. I guess I got swept up in her thoughts, so even the _me_  that was there wasn't totally me."

Pidge sniffled, swiping the back of their hand across their nose. "But you're you now?"

"I am," he said, settling his hands on their shoulders and squeezing. "Red's still part of me, but we're not... what we were." He grimaced, but he didn't know how to put it into words--the link between them, the barriers, the currents that had bandied him about. He couldn't say they were fully separate now, but he _felt_ himself, and that was something that hadn't been true of any of the other times he surfaced from their shared memories.

Pidge's face crumpled, and the smushed it against his shoulder, sniffling again. "Don't disappear on us again, okay? If you do, I'm gonna figure out how to mind meld with a lion and come in there to kick your ass myself."

Akira's lips twitched, but he bit down on the urge to laugh. As much as Pidge was making light of this, he knew he had hurt them with what he'd done. He'd hurt everyone. _We were wrong,_ Red had said, and maybe she was right. She'd been wrong to ask him to give himself up, and he'd been wrong to volunteer, the both of them so caught up in preserving Voltron, winning the war, that they forgot about the people they were trying to protect.

"I'm not going anywhere, Pidge," he whispered. "I swear."

* * *

Meri couldn't focus on anything. Not on her research, not on the Coalition, certainly not on anything Allura tried to dangle in front of her nose as a distraction. She tried to muscle through it--it was only an hour until the meeting, and Akira would be there. She could see him then, reassure herself that he was okay. She could be that patient.

Apparently not, because twenty minutes after Shiro sent out the memo, Meri found herself wandering down to the Guard complex out in Blue Tower, her hands in her pockets, her earbuds in and blasting music to drown out the voices of people she passed. She didn't want to stop to chat, she didn't want to wonder which of them were talking about her, which of them were gossiping about why she was down here. Wasn't like she was a common sight in these halls. Not anymore.

She still knew her way around perfectly well, and she navigated to the command center without a problem. She'd surprised Akira at the end of a shift more than once, dragging him away from paperwork and training plans and battle formations to unwind with a drink or a game or a race on the long-distance track in the gravity-shifted segment of Green Tower The far end of the course disappeared into the distance and the track was flanked by artificial pools, planters full of trees, hydration stations and medical kits and comms panels. Meri had trained here when she was young, challenging herself to run the full distance without stopping. (She'd never managed it before Altea's fall, but one of her identities on Earth had been a marathon hopeful, and the endurance she'd built up meant she probably could have managed it now... if she weren't always holding back to keep pace with Akira.)

Akira wasn't in his room now--she'd checked, before coming down here--and there was still more than thirty minutes until the meeting. She'd figured he would come to see Layeni while he had a moment--give her the respect of hearing the news from him, instead of through the grapevine. And she was right.

She spotted him through an open door, laughing brightly at something Layeni had said. She scowled and punched him in the shoulder, but there was no force behind it.

Meri stopped where she was, the music still blasting in her ears, but she hardly heard it. Akira. He really was back--she knew it was him, even from just this one brief glance. Red never laughed like that; her smile tried to match Akira's, but it always felt somehow strained.

Heart pounding, Meri watched Akira flit about the room. Some of his other officers were there, too, and they swarmed around him. He was their commander, yes, but he was also their friend. He was just that sort of person, making connections wherever he went. The Guard had held up well in his absence, thanks to Layeni's command, but they'd all missed Akira.

Meri didn't want to interrupt. She didn't feel she needed to. It was enough to see Akira smiling and chatting, as vibrant as ever. That was all she'd needed: to know that the rumors were true, and that he really was back. Not that she didn't believe Allura and Matt when they said as much, but... There was a difference between Akira coming back and Akira being okay. Meri knew that better than anyone.

She watched for several moments, until Akira abruptly glanced at the clock and raised a hand in farewell as he headed for the door. With a jolt, Meri realized the meeting was set to start in just a few minutes. She though about making a break for it before Akira saw her lurking out here, just watching him, but the corridor here stretched too far in either direction without a corner to hide around.

The next thing Meri knew, Akira was beside her, a smile lighting up his face.

She pulled her headphones out and returned the smile a little guiltily. "Hey," she said, ever-so-slightly breathless. "Headed to the meeting?"

He nodded. "What, did my brother send you to escort me up there?"

It was such a bizarre idea that Meri had to laugh. "What? No." They turned together and headed back toward the elevator. "I was taking a jog. Saw you in there and figured we could walk up together."

It wasn't her best excuse ever, but it gave a reason for her breathlessness--and a reason for her to be down here that wasn't, _I wanted to see you and then decided to lurk in the hallway like a creeper._

Akira didn't question it, though, and they fell into step beside each other, silence swelling as they walked to the elevator. "I missed you."

Meri gave a start, swiveling to squint at the side of Akira's face. "Isn't that my line?"

"Sure." He flashed a smile. "But it's going to get old sooner or later. I figured I'd mix it up a little." The elevator came into sight around the next corner, and Akira fell quiet until they were inside, leaning against the back wall close enough for Meri to feel the ghost of his shoulder a hair's breadth from her own. "It's true, though. I couldn't totally keep track of who I was while I was in there, but whenever I came back to myself, I missed you."

Meri pursed her lips. "You're the one who decided to martyr himself for the sake of the war." It came out a little more bitter than she intended, and her shoulders slumped. "That was uncalled for."

"Doesn’t mean it’s not true," Akira said, staring straight ahead with a troubled look on his face. "You have every right to be angry with me. I know I hurt a lot of people by doing what I did. I..." He huffed a laugh as the door opened, and he turned to face her. "I can't say I regret it, not really. It saved Red, and I made it back on top of that, so it's hard to apologize for any of it. But, well, I'm sorry it happened the way it did."

"You should have told us," Meri said. "We could have figured something out."

Akira's face darkened, and he strode from the elevator, Meri giving chase. "You would have stopped me."

"Of _course_  we would have stopped you--"

"Red was dying." Akira closed his eyes, looking more weary than Meri had ever seen him. "I started to suspect what I was going to have to do around the time we got to Oriande, but I didn't know if it would work, and I was hoping we would find an answer. I didn't _want_  to give myself up, but then I saw Red, saw the state she was in, and the answer was obvious."

Meri scoffed. "Obvious."

He glanced her way, and for a moment his pupils flashed with a reflected magenta light. (A trick of the eyes; Meri blinked, and the light was gone, and it was just Akira, sad gray eyes watching her expectantly.) "Was there an alternative?"

"What?"

"You've had two months. You've been hoping to undo what I did. Did you ever find something else that would have saved Red?" He waited for her to answer, but she had nothing for him, and after a moment, he tipped his head to the side and gestured with one hand. "Like I said. I'm sorry I hurt you, but I can't be sorry about what I did."

Meri sighed, wrapping her arms around herself. She didn't have any room to criticize him, not when she was so much the same. How many times had Coran and Allura begged her to come home after she'd gone off to spy? How many times had they held back? She'd read their longing in every message they sent, however careful they were to keep their words neutral, however much they tried to stay on topic.

She'd nearly destroyed herself for the sake of the war, and she never had been able to apologize for making that choice.

Akira wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to a stop. "Does it help if I promise not to do anything like that again?"

"Depends. Is that a promise you can keep?"

For a moment, Meri was afraid she might have offended Akira with the question, but he only grinned, their faces so close together Meri couldn't look anywhere except at him. "Of course I can keep it," he said. "I've got you right here to scare me straight if I start down that path again."

Meri felt her face flush, and she dug her elbow into his side before she flung her arms around him and pulled him in for a hug. "It's a promise, then."

* * *

Most of the team was already gathered in the conference room by the time Akira and Meri arrived. From the tense silence hanging over the room and the way they all looked like they were trying to keep themselves busy, he had a feeling it was more about him than about the meeting, unless the war had gotten _way_  more dicey than Takashi had let on.

Val was the first to notice him, flinging her tablet aside with a shriek and launching up from her chair. She leaped at Akira, nearly knocking him over--that was going to be a theme today, wasn't it?--and squealing into his ear. "Akira! You're okay!"

Tired as hell and already developing a bit of a headache that he hoped was just the fatigue, but compared to the alternative, he'd say he was more than just okay. Grinning, he squeezed Val back, spinning her around once before pulling back. "Did you really think I wouldn't be? Oh, ye of little faith. It takes more than a metaphysical timeshare to get rid of me."

Her answering laugh was light, but she was misty-eyed and pulled away quickly to wipe her eyes as the rest of the team surged forward to greet him.

In retrospect, he probably should have thought to come to this meeting a little earlier, because what followed was a solid ten minutes of hugs, tears, too-relieved-to-be-angry lectures, and the same awkward apologies. It all made one thing clear to him, uncomfortably so: there was a part of him, small and almost silent, but lurking in the depths of his heart, that had been expecting to die, or to disappear, and that part of him resented coming back. He hadn't ever expected to have to face the consequences of his decision.

It was a horrible, selfish, petty thing to think, and it was drowned out by a much larger part of him that was overwhelmingly grateful to be home, but when Hunk broke down in tears on his shoulder; when Karen took his face between her hands, stared him in the eye for a long moment, and then simply kissed his forehead; when Coran squeezed him so tight Akira could hear his bones creak and feel the tremor that had taken root in Coran’s hands; when Allura cupped his cheek in her hand and smiled at him with tears in her eyes and a fleeting glance Meri's way ...

How could Akira have turned his back on all this?

How could he have thought the sacrifice was his alone?

Keith, Matt, Pidge, and Takashi sat back as the rest of the team took their turns welcoming Akira home, Pidge latched onto Keith like a koala, Takashi blinking back tears and beaming every time Akira caught sight of him through the crowd. The constant warmth that burned inside him--Red's flame--was nothing compared to the warmth he felt right here, right now, surrounded by a family that only ever wanted him to be safe. And if his return wasn't all sunshine and rainbows--if his head throbbed and his eyes burned and dark, bitter memories crowded around him like a hornets' nest waiting for the signal to swarm--he could deal with that. It was a cost well worth paying if it meant he got to be here, as himself, for a little while longer.

Takashi and the Holts weren't the only ones hanging back. It took Akira a good few minutes to notice, considering every time he had a chance to breathe, there was someone else ready to give him a rib-cracking hug, but once everyone had had their chance to welcome him home and they'd all calmed down enough to breathe a little bit, Akira saw her.

She stood against the wall, arms crossed over her chest, face expressionless, violet eyes never leaving Akira for a second.

With a pang, he remembered late nights in his cockpit, movies playing on the viewscreen, junk food spilling everywhere. Quiet nights, full of little conversation. Light conversation, when it happened. These were the only times in these last weeks that he hadn't felt like he was failing to live up to someone's expectations.

Akira smiled at Lance, who seemed to be reenacting one of the battles Akira had missed, and quietly excused himself, threading through the crowd to where Nyma stood, tensing at his approach. She watched him, and Akira didn't think the tears in her eyes were quite so joyful as the others'.

Red stirred, a distant, quiet, sleepy gratitude suffusing his chest. It was a pleasant ache, a bittersweet fondness, and he slowed as he approached Nyma.

"Thank you," he said, reaching out to lay a hand on Nyma's arm. She jumped, staring at his hand on her arm and then lifting her head to stare him in the eye. An affection not entirely his own choked him up for a moment, and he surged forward to pull Nyma into a hug. "Thank you for being there for her. She didn't know how to say it, but--she needed someone in her corner. I'm glad she had you."

Nyma had gone rigid, her shoulders rising toward her ears, but after a moment, she relaxed enough for her hovering hands to settle on Akira's hips. She bowed her head enough that she could speak in his ear, low so the others wouldn't hear. "Is she...?"

"She's still in here," he said. "Resting for now, but we're going to try to figure out how to coexist."

Nyma sagged against him, her relief palpable, and he smiled over her shoulder. When she spoke again, the guilt was already creeping into her voice. "Sorry. It's not that I'm not glad you're back--"

He pulled back so she could see his smile. "It's okay," he said. "I get it."

* * *

Eventually, Takashi got everyone focused and the meeting began. Akira mostly sat back and let the others do the talking. He'd missed a lot--and not much at the same time. The big issues were still the same: the Vkullor, Dark Voltron. It seemed robeasts had made a resurgence recently, as well. And of course, the Coalition was falling apart. Takashi and Allura had been heading up diplomatic efforts while most of the rest of the team looked into ways to deal with the Vkullor, but so far no one had turned up anything useful.

Well, Lance did seem to have proposed tracking the Vkullor, but they didn't have a plan on how to do _that_ , when Vkullor disrupted Quintessence and electromagnetic fields to a degree that made most forms of tracking useless.

Akira listened with interest, content to absorb the information for now, to muse on it later, when he had more time. Then Pidge mentioned something, off hand, that had him sitting forward.

“We thought maybe magic might be the key, but whatever kind of magic might help us, we don’t have access to it. But I mean, it’s that or figure out how to manipulate the lion bonds to track something that’s decidedly not a lion.”

Allura grimaced. “Unfortunately, the lion bonds aren’t that malleable.”

"No, hang on," Akira said, leaning forward and crossing his arms on the table. "That's it! Maybe you can’t manipulate the bond, but you can mimic it. Why not make linked trackers?"

The others stared at him like he'd gone crazy and, exasperated, Akira pushed back his chair, stood, and cast about him for something small. Karen had a pad of paper and a pen on the table in front of her, and Akira nodded, plucking up the pen and waggling it in Karen's direction. "Mind if I borrow this?"

She waved her assent, and Akira raised the pen to his brow in salute. He crossed to where Val was sitting between Pidge and Nyma and held the pen out to her.

"Infuse this with Quintessence for me."

Val tipped her head back and quirked an eyebrow. "What makes you think I know how to do that?"

Akira pursed his lips, but Allura held out her hand, and Akira passed the pen to her. Her hand glowed for a moment, the pen's image rippling like a mirage for a moment before the Quintessence glow faded. "That won't last long," Allura warned. "I don't think humans design their pens to hold Quintessence."

Akira waved her off. "That's fine. I just need twenty seconds. Val?"

He thrust the pen back to her and gestured for her to stand. She did so, looking both confused and mildly suspicious.

"Would you mind bilocating to the other side of the room for me?"

"Why?"

"Call it a demonstration." Akira smiled at her, and she sighed, but did as he'd asked, a second copy of her appearing by the door. The two Vals glanced at each other, then hastily turned away, both of them looking a little green.

"I hope you're not going to make me hold this long," the first Val said. "I hate seeing my duplicates up close."

Akira shook his head. "Not long at all. In fact." He turned to the second Val and raised his hand. "Go ahead and let go of the bilocation, but drop the pen right before you do."

Everyone looked confused and mildly suspicious now, but Val had come this far, and apparently she'd decided to see this demonstration through. The second Val raised her hand, pen grasped between two fingers, and let go. The first Val wrinkled her nose at the same instant, and her duplicate vanished as the pen began to fall.

It stopped in midair, hovering almost motionless several feet off the floor.

Akira smiled.

Val turned as whispers and gasps flitted across the table, and the hovering pen jerked suddenly to the side. " _What?_ " she hissed.

Akira rounded the table, reached down, and grabbed the pen. Val yelped in surprise as her copy of the pen flew out of her hand--perfectly mimicking the motion of Akira's as he waved it through a few figure eights. "Plop one on the Vkullor, track the other. Easy. As long as the Quintessence infusion lasts, the two should stay perfectly in sync indefinitely. If you can define their relative positions, then you'll always know where the Vkullor is without tracking it directly."

There was a brief pause, and then Takashi spoke up, his voice hardly more than a whisper. "How did you know how to do that?"

Akira glanced at him, baffled. "What are you talking about? It's the same thing we did with the crystals." He bobbled his head side to side as Allura's infusion ran out and the other pen dropped to the table with a clatter. "I mean, not the _same_  thing. What we did was more astral projection than bilocation. But it's the same concept."

"The... crystals?" Pidge asked.

He stared at them. "The ones in the lions? The ones that let us project our consciousnesses from Oriande?"

It hit him just a split second after the last baffled expression staring back at him turned to horror, and the wind went out of him. He sagged against the table, feeling suddenly nauseous. "Sorry." He pressed a hand to his forehead, cold sweat sticking to his skin. "Sorry. That... That must have come from Red."

"Akira." Takashi was on his feet in an instant, crossing to Akira's side, but he stopped short, hand hovering in the air like he was afraid to touch him.

Akira rubbed his eyes, his skin crawling. Just like last night, he felt like a stranger in his body, suffocating, barely tethered to the here-and-now. "Sorry," he said again. He didn't know what else to say.

"Are you okay?"

Akira laughed, pushing his hair back with one hand and straining to put on a smile for his brother. "I'm fine. Just got confused for a second. Red's memories are all mixed in with mine, so sometimes it's hard to pinpoint why I know something. It's no big deal."

It was a very big deal, and the looks that ran around the table agreed, but no one seemed to want to say anything, and Takashi still just stood there, hovering, staring at him like he was trying to see beneath his skin. Akira hunched his shoulders, a headache pounding behind his temples as he returned to his chair. He dropped his head into his hands, the silence prickling down his spine as he waited for someone to take pity on him and move the conversation along.

Allura finally did, asking Pidge and Val to run some tests on this new application of bilocation, see if they could come up with some workable trackers. She volunteered to help, as one of the few on the castle experienced with directing the flow of Quintessence into and out of people and objects.

Still Takashi hovered, standing just behind Akira's chair, stiff and watchful, his breath rattling Akira's nerves. Eventually, he returned to his own seat, and the meeting continued on, and when it finally ended, Akira wasted no time in breaking away from the group. He was the first one out of the room, and he didn't stop walking until the others' voices faded, leaving him alone with the other consciousness inside his head.

* * *

Shiro managed to wait until the rest of the team had left the room before he collapsed. His heart was racing, beating at his rib cage like a frenzied bird trying to break its way free but only succeeding in battering itself half to death.

 _Akira's fine,_ he told himself, propping his elbows on the table and dropping his head down between them. _Akira's back. He just got confused. Can't expect him to fuse his entire being with another person and not have any side effects. It doesn't mean you're losing him again._

But, _god_ , did it feel like Shiro was losing him again.

He'd wanted to chase after Akira when he spotted him fleeing the room, but Shiro knew himself, and he knew his brother. If Shiro didn't give them both enough time to calm down and snap out of their panic, then they'd only end up feeding off each other. Shiro would start to hover, and Akira would feel crowded, and both of them would be wound so tight it would probably end in a fight.

...Plus, Shiro was already light headed and shaking, and if Akira wanted to run, Shiro wasn't sure he'd be able to keep up without collapsing in the middle of the hallway.

Heels clicked softly against the tiled floor, and Shiro lifted his head to find Karen approaching, her notebook hugged to her chest with two pens clipped to the spiral binding. She'd seemed wary of taking the duplicated pen, but when it didn't crumble into dust at her touch or spontaneously combust at being brought near its doppelganger, she'd smothered her unease and accepted that she had one more pen now than she'd had when the meeting began.

He smiled at her, weary, and gestured to the seat beside him. "I hope I didn't make you worry," he said.

Karen shook her head, her gaze trailing along the upper seams of the wall. "I think we're _all_  worried, Shiro. We only just got Akira back, and none of us is secure in that. Hearing him talk like that shook us all."

Shiro ran his hand down his face. "That's one word for it. I think I'd have gone for 'scared us shitless.'"

Karen turned back to him. "You _are_ scared, if you're willing to admit it." She smiled as Shiro's face burned, and reached over to pat his arm. "It's understandable. But you don't need to worry. Akira's been far deeper in Red's memories than he was just now, and he hasn't lost himself yet."

Shiro considered her, weighing her words. Karen had a natural conviction about her, and the fact that she was Green's adjunct made it all the harder to doubt her, however much the fear tried to close in around his throat, whispering about how easy it would be to lose Akira for good.

After a few seconds, he managed to summon a small smile. "You're right." He paused, then chuckled. "I suppose I need to have a little more faith in him, don't I?"

"I think you deserve a little more time to get used to having him back."

Shiro nodded, breathed, and stood up. "Well, thanks. And if you see Akira, tell him I'll be on the bridge."

"Not going after him?" Karen asked, a note of surprise in her voice.

"Not yet. If he needs time alone, I'll respect that, at least for a while. Like you said, none of us is used to him being back. He's probably just as shaken as the rest of us." And if Akira didn’t show up for lunch, _then_ Shiro would start to worry. Until then, he would do his best to distract himself.

* * *

Akira needed to breathe.

_Breathe._

_**Breathe.** _

He didn't know if it was his own voice telling him to breathe, or if it was Red's, but it wasn't compelling enough to override the panic clawing at his throat.

He was Akira Shirogane, twin brother of Takashi Shirogane, former Galaxy Garrison cargo pilot, current Commander of the Voltron Guard, adjunct to the Red Lion.

Vessel for the Red Lion, now, he supposed. But vessel was better than being the same-as.

He was Akira, and he was human, and he was _himself_ , no matter what memories slipped into his head from Red's, no matter how real they felt.

He _remembered_ making those crystals, even now that he knew where the memory had come from. He remembered descending into the Heart--a new trick they'd discovered in the moment of the Fission. He remembered the Heart back then, half-formed and always shifting. His sisters were echoes of distant voices, sometime close, sometimes far, always on the edge of his mind. He remembered the half-formed lion shells they were building on Altea, the plan that resonated among five minds still learning to think independently.

He remembered how they'd directed their Quintessence, solidifying it into five crystals that resonated with the five new _kotha_  produced in the Fission. Those crystals had remained on Oriande only for a short time, the architects behind Voltron arriving to claim them at dawn.

It had made the early morning surreal, his thoughts loud and the rest of the universe a muted hum beyond his sight until his crystal left to be fitted into place inside the Red Lion.

And he knew he had no right to feel that pull in his chest, like a spring pulled taught, drawing him outwards into the larger universe.

Or maybe this was all just a farce, and it was Akira's memories that were stolen.

His chest went tight at the thought, but it was one he couldn't shake off. He'd only been back for half a day. How many times had he already felt as though his skin didn't fit? Like he was hovering just outside himself, watching a stranger move his limbs and speak with his voice? He'd kept Takashi up talking half the night just to have something to make himself feel more real.

But what if that was a lie? What if he'd never found his way out of the memories?

What if he'd never been real at all?

He was aware of another presence nearby before the door opened, casting light on the small, dark, cramped space he'd claimed. He'd run without thinking, letting his feet carry him somewhere no one would chance upon him--a cozy little workshop in Yellow Tower that had been cleaned and straightened in case someone found a use for it, but which had, so far, remained pristine. If there were any mechanics among the refugees, they'd found other places to expend their creative energy.

The presence that was coming, though, was far too familiar to be a random refugee Akira had met only in passing, if ever. Familiar, but he couldn't put his finger on why.

The door opened, and Red purred somewhere in the back of his mind, and Akira's stomach gave another somersault as Wyn poked his head into the room.

Wyn?

No. It wasn't Blue whose eyes chased him like an attentive mother hen. It was... Yellow's?

"Rowan," Akira said, and Rowan jumped--seemingly as startled by the acknowledgement as Akira was by his awareness of Rowan and the others who shared a body with Wyn.

Red oozed apology, and the ice in Akira's chest claimed a little more ground as he realized that, no, he'd never met Rowan. He didn't think Red had, either, to be fair, but she was aware of him, of the whole system, by virtue of her connection to the other lions, and their connections to their paladins.

Rowan stopped in place, his hand toying with a bucket of parts on the table nearest the door, his eyes looking anywhere but at Akira. "How'd you know it was me?"

Akira breathed out a laugh, his fingers tangling in his hair. "That's a _great_  question. I wish I could answer it for you. Best guess is it's got something to do with Red."

Rowan's shoes scuffed against the floor, and he crept forward until he was close enough to take a seat on the padded bench that flanked the larger of the two work tables. Akira had opted for the floor, parking himself on the rim of a tiered depression in the tiled floor (Red informed him that it was some sort of gravity well for hoisting heavy machinery off the ground) and letting his feet trail down into the basin.

"You're Akira, right?"

The question twisted, though Akira was sure Rowan didn't mean anything by it. He opened his mouth to respond, but the words wouldn't come. His eyes burned, and he bowed his head down onto his knees.

"I don't know," he finally said, levity clashing with the choked sound of tears on the verge of falling. "That's what I keep telling myself."

Rowan was quiet for a long while, watching Akira without saying a word. The panicky buzz faded slowly, but the guilt remained, sitting in his stomach like a lead ball, refusing to let him forget about the doubts that kept plucking at his mind.

"You don't know?" Rowan asked at length.

Akira gave a jerky shrug, staring at the far wall, where tools had been suspended on a board with no apparent hooks or loops to keep them in place. Magnets? Or another gravity field? Red was no help on this one.

"There's a lot of things I don't know right now," he said, his voice ticking up at the end. He laughed, scrubbing at his eyes. "Sorry. It's been a rough day. Yes, I'm Akira. I'm sure Wyn's seen me around, even if we never really talked."

"Oh, we all know who you are. You're kind of impossible to miss."

Akira cracked a smile at that and turned to look at Rowan. "I'll take that as a compliment. So what are you doing all the way out here? Looking for something?"

Rowan shook his head. "No, not really. It just felt like somewhere I should be."

That would be Yellow, then. She'd always been a worrier, right from the moment they all split apart--

Akira's smile slipped as he yanked himself back from Red's thought patterns. He didn't need to go diving down into all that again. Yellow was worried about Red, and probably about Akira, too. That wasn't all that surprising.

It _was_ curious that she'd sent Rowan to find him.

"Are you okay?" Rowan asked.

Akira shook his head. "Eh, I've been better. But you don't need to take on my issues."

"Issues like... wondering whether you're the figment of someone else's imagination?"

Akira whipped around so hard he had to put a hand down for balance, his heart drumming in his chest. "How...?"

Rowan laughed. "You think you're the only one who feels like that?" He kicked one foot against the ground. "Believe me, Akira, I've been there. It's not so hard to figure out what you're thinking, especially after you've been gone so long." His brows drew together, digging a furrow down his forehead. "It's always worst when you've been absent for a long time."

Akira turned, pulling one foot up onto the top step so he could look at Rowan more directly. "You don't think you're real?" he asked.

"I know I'm real," Rowan said, almost defensively. "It's just hard to feel it, sometimes. We all feel like we're faking every now and then. And since Wyn's our host--since he's the one who uses the name our parents gave us, since he's the one who feels at home in this body, since he's the one who's been around the longest, as far as I can tell--wouldn't that mean that all the rest of us are the ones he made up?" He shook his head, continuing on before Akira could figure out how to respond. "It's easy enough to shake off, most of the time. But believe me when I say I know what it's like not to feel real."

Akira let out a rush of air, Rowan's words leaving him gutted. "Yeah, but... Red and I merged. Every bit of us. Our Quintessence, our memories... How do I know I'm not just the remnants of Akira bundled up together and lying to myself about what really happened? I knew when I did this that there was no taking it back. _I_ shouldn't exist anymore, not separate from Red."

"Quintessence is... strange," Rowan said. He leaned back on the bench, bracing his hands against the cushion and staring at the ceiling tiles. "Memory, too. They're not the same thing, but they're tied together in a way that gets messy fast."

Akira frowned, one part of him wondering where this had come from. The rest of him was searching for a memory beyond his grasp. He felt as though he'd heard this somewhere before. Quintessence was the conduit and memory the particles that flowed through it. Or... something like that. The memory was a whisper of an echo of someone else's dream.

A lot of what he'd inherited from Red was like that.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well..." Rowan tipped his head to the side, falling silent for a long moment. "Quintessence is... life. Is connection. Is self, except not completely. The blood carries the oxygen and nutrients and waste products and hormones, and all of that, right? Almost everything a physical body needs to survive is carried through the blood, but the blood itself isn't alive. It's like that with Quintessence. Quintessence carries memories, and emotions, and identity, and everything else that makes up who we are, but _we_ are more than Quintessence. _But_ , when Quintessence mixes with other Quintessence, things bleed over, and who you are gets hard to pin down."

Akira had a sudden, intense flash of deja vu. Of standing beside himself, of looking through new eyes at pieces of the whole he used to be. Alteans stood over him, awe on their faces, but Akira only felt hollow. He had lost most of himself.

He didn't know, anymore, who he was.

Sucking in a sharp breath, Akira shoved Red's memories away. The somber, distant look on Rowan's face quieted him. "You're not just talking about me and Red, are you?"

Rowan shrugged. "I am. But I'm also talking about us, and about the paladins. Quintessence mixes a lot around here, just in different ways."

"How so?"

"Well... On the simpler end of things, you've got the paladins. Keith and Matt are two different people, with two different personalities, and two completely different Quintessences. Right? Except because of the paladin bond, there's a channel open between them. Like they're two lakes, and somebody dug a canal to connect them. There are gates along that canal, so not a lot gets through. Little bits and pieces. A few memories, a lot of emotion. They affect each other, and they each have a little bit of each other in them, but unless they open that connection a lot, for a long time, there's never going to be any question who either of them are.

"Then, you've got me and Wyn and the others. We're like... We're like a _hydral_ colony."

"A what?"

"A _hydral._ It's a plant we had on New Altea. The colony puts down the root system, and each new seed hooks into that instead of growing their own. So the stalks and leaves and flowers and all that? Each one is its own organism. They're genetically different. You can prove that. But they share roots that carry water and nutrients and chemical signals from plant to plant across the colony. Wyn and I have measurably different Quintessence signatures; Coran's proved that. They're similar enough that you can't tell at a glance, but there are definite differences if you're looking for them. But we're connected deep down in a way that lets things bleed through. Memories. Emotions. We tug on each other. We influence how the others react to things. None of us really knows what Leth went through when we were Haggar's prisoner, but there are things that only they've seen that can give Wyn a panic attack or make me go back inside. We all _know_ who we are, but there's so much crossover sometimes that if we're not in a good place, we can start to lose sight of that."

Akira considered that for a moment, staring at his hands. He could almost see the Quintessence flowing beneath his skin, but he thought that was just another echo from Red. She'd seen his Quintessence before she'd seen _him_ , and she still sometimes saw those flows when she looked in the mirror.

"What about me and Red?" he asked, trying to keep the question casual. "Are we a _hydral_ , too? Or are we a couple of lakes with a canal connecting us?"

"Neither," Rowan said. "You're... You're like somebody dumped oil and water together and shook it up real good--and just kept shaking so it never had a chance to settle. Your Quintessence and Red's are different. They always have been, and they still are--and there is a connection between you, like a canal, but bigger--but mostly you just both wound up with a whole bunch of each other still mixed in."

"Huh..."

Rowan snapped his mouth shut. "Sorry. Was I rambling?"

"No." Akira shook his head. "It's fine. I just... I'd never thought about it like that before. You think those bits of Red will ever go away, or is it always gonna be like this?" He paused, then made a face. "You don't have to answer that. I'm just thinking out loud."

Rowan leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "I don't think I could answer that, even if I tried. I know I said you and Red were like oil and water, which would imply that you two would keep separating out until you're mostly you again and Red's mostly Red again, but I don't know if that's really how it is. Maybe you're both going to absorb the pieces of each other that got left behind, so you'll both end up as still two different people, but a little more alike. Or maybe... maybe it's like oil and water, but with an egg thrown in the mix."

"An egg?"

"Or any other emulsifier," Rowan said. "Hunk was teaching me about them the other day. He said you use eggs when you're baking so that the oil and water stay mixed.”

“Hunk’s been teaching you about cooking?” Akira asked with a grin.

Rowan squirmed. “I was bored, and Maka and Mateo were still asleep. Anyway, my point is, maybe it’s not as simple as you and Red separating or becoming one. Maybe you'll still be you, and Red will still be Red, but you'll get used to having them inside you. Their memories won't become yours, but they won't feel so much like an intrusion."

Akira blinked down at him. "You know, you’re pretty sharp sometimes.”

Rowan grinned. "Perks of living with Wyn and Leth for so long. You gotta learn to read between the lines." He was quiet for a long moment, his gaze far-off. "We're not the same, Akira. I know that. I haven't been through what you've been through, and you haven't been through what we've been through."

"You're too smart to put yourself through what I've been through," Akira said with a lopsided grin.

A startled laugh slipped out of Rowan, and he returned Akira's smile with a bashful one of his own. "What I mean is, I can't tell you what you're going through. I can't promise that you're real, or that it's going to get better. But I do know what it's like to feel like an imposter. I know what it's like to be scared. And I _definitely_  know what it's like to never be alone inside your own head. So, you know. If you ever want to talk..."

Akira's smile softened, something inside him quieting down. Red was purring, oozing satisfaction and lobbing it Yellow's way, and Akira couldn't help but agree.

 _You found a keeper, Yellow,_  he thought, nodding to Rowan before standing and waving him toward the door. "Come on. It's almost lunch time. I'll walk you down?"

Rowan joined him with a spring in his step, and Akira had to wonder if he felt lighter, too, for having someone to share the burden. Akira put an arm around Rowan's shoulder, and smiled as Rowan melted against his side.

* * *

Sam was getting good at adapting.

Ironic that it wasn't the alien abduction that had proved that to him, or the experiments, or the astral projection, or the giant evil robot lion he'd been linked to.

No, what pushed him over the edge was the telepathy.

"Are you _sure_  there's even anything here for us to find?" Rax asked. He hung back while Sam and Rolo dug through the computers in the office here. It was late enough that they were unlikely to be interrupted, but it _had_  been a long day already--no new sessions in the lab, but guards kept sweeping into their cell, interrupting their sleep, appearing for no reason that Sam could see other than to unnerve them.

Why? They couldn't know what had happened during that last fight. Even if Zarkon had sensed something-- _could_  he have sensed something?--he couldn't possibly know what it meant... Right?

Regardless, the guards kept coming, and the only thing worse than being woken from legitimate rest was being shaken awake by a guard when they were out patrolling like this, searching for something that might help the paladins. They'd made a few, short outings in the last few days to check up on the druids' work. They seemed mostly to be repairing the lions after the last battle, with no recorded plans for next steps. Did that mean Dark Voltron had reached its full potential? Or did Haggar not trust anyone else with her plans for the next phase?

Questions and more questions. As much as Sam wanted to find the answers, they didn't seem to be coming. Maybe that was why he'd reached out to Shiro this morning, asking him what information he could most use. A desire to help, or just a desperation for some form of distraction?

Sam didn't know, but this adjunct bond had given him a fresh burst of energy and motivation, even if he didn't fully understand what the bond entailed. It gave him a connection to Shiro, something real and tangible and... _so weird._

What he wouldn't give for a lab and some equipment to study the bond properly, figure out what it was and how it worked. Define its limitations.

Maybe when he got out of here.

(For the first time in a long time, he didn't have to strain to believe that he might, actually, make it out.)

Rolo was waiting when Sam emerged from the computer, a fresh dump of files peppered across the screen. Rolo was, if possible, even more enthused about Sam's adjunct bond than Sam himself. Sam had explained it all to the both of them the first chance he got after the battle. Rax was skeptical--seemed, almost, to think that Sam should have refused the bond--but Rolo had burst alive with new ideas and new energy.

"I don't know if we'll find anything or not," Sam said to Rax, gripping him by the arms and willing a measure of comfort into him. "But if we can?"

"We help the paladins rescue somebody _else_ ," Rax said. "Somebody who's not us."

Rolo, bent over the computer, scoffed. "What, you want them to sit on their hands until they have an actual lead on us? They don't know where we are. _We_  don't even know where we are."

"Rolo," Sam said, soft but firm. He kept his eyes on Rax. "I know it's hard, but believe me when I say the paladins aren't giving up on us. The second they think they can rescue us, they will drop _everything_  to reach us. Until then..."

"Until then, it looks like they're going to be hunting some robeasts."

Sam turned, his heart soaring. "You found something?"

"Coordinates," Rolo said. "Just for the one lab, but there's references to others. I'll keep looking, but there's not a lot here that doesn't have to do with Vindication. They might have more luck looking in the files at this place."

Sam nodded. "Well, let me pass this along, at least. Before we're interrupted."

Rolo nodded, moving aside so Sam had full access to the computer screen. Sam found the coordinates on the screen, reaching out at the same time with the extra sense that resided in the bond. He found it far easier to use the bond than to wrap his head around it--fortunately, but also frustratingly. It was like a switch tucked away in some dark corner, one he couldn't see but could feel, a familiar part of a control panel he'd trained on for years.

One tap and his mind was whisking away, chasing an invisible train through the darkness to a distant, familiar star.

The link opened, and it wasn't so much a link as a breath of fresh air, a release of tension, settling into his favorite chair.

_Shiro?_

Shiro's attention swung his way, and the bond cleared, silence ringing in his ears like static on the radio.

 _Sam?_ Shiro asked. The other black paladin--Allura--lurked on the fringes of the conversation, watchful and curious but respectfully distant. She had a sharp mind and a gentle demeanor, and Sam could see at a glance how much she cared for Shiro. He hoped one day he'd have a chance to get to know her better.

 _I hope you have something to write with,_  Sam said, his eyes finding the coordinates on the screen. _Because I have a target for you._


	30. The Lions of Voltron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Robeasts have begun to make a resurgence. The new crop isn't as tough as what Voltron once faced, but a swarm of them could pose a problem. Sam Holt, who has been looking for a way to help the paladins since becoming the black adjunct, dug through records in the Vindication lab and found the coordinates to one of several remaining robeasts labs. Now the paladins are on their way to end this threat once and for all.

"Been a while since I've done this," Pidge remarked as they shuffled through the air vents somewhere deep in an Imperial lab, neck aching, elbows banging against the metal with every awkward shuffle forward. "I forgot how much I _didn't_ miss it."

"Aw, c'mon, Pidge," Lance said, bright and cheerful--because of course _he_  didn't need to do this. "You _love_  terrorizing poor unsuspecting lab techs by dropping down out of the ceiling."

Pidge paused to catch their breath. "You all _do_  realize the last time I did this was like eight months ago, right? I know I'm still the midget of the group, but I _have_  grown--and these vents definitely have _not._ "

Matt snickered. "Never thought I'd hear they day you complained about being too tall."

"You wanna crawl through the vents next time, _Matt_? We're almost the same height now, you know." He couldn't see the way they bared their teeth in a vicious smile, but their words stopped him laughing, if nothing else. With a huff, Pidge got moving again--slow, methodical. Wedge one foot against the side of the vent and shove, repeat with the other foot. Shimmy forward a few inches at a time. Just a couple hundred feet left to go. "Why isn't _Meri_  doing this part? She can shapeshift herself into an Arusian and have no problem fitting through here."

Meri scoffed. "Yeah, and then what would I do? Kick down the doors to let you in? You're the resident tech genius, remember?"

Pidge grunted. "I'm rebranding myself. I'm not the tech genius. I'm the screaming banshee who can't do stealth to save their life."

"I think Keith's already got that covered," Lance said. "Remind me why he's part of the infiltration team?"

"Because the Empire still relies too much on species locks," Shiro said. He sounded almost bored, and not at all bothered by the squabbling on the comms. "Keith can get them through those locks faster than Pidge's hacking. They'll need Pidge to go through the files, and Meri knows enough about how these labs run to pick up on things we didn't plan for."

So Pidge got stuck crawling through dusty old air ducts to the security room so they could shut off enough security to get the other two inside. It was a good thing they weren't claustrophobic.

Their foot slipped as they were scooting forward, and their knee banged against the bottom of the duct, the noise making them cringe. "I really don't think this counts as stealthy anymore. Next time we do this, we need a better plan."

"You're almost there, Pidge," Hunk said. He, at least, had the decency to sound sympathetic. "Next vent should be the one."

"Great." Pidge panted as they surged forward again, their eyes locked on the light streaming up through the vent ahead of them. "Let's just hope I'm not dropping down into a room full of guards curious about all the thumping coming from the ceilings."

"Like you can't take down a couple of guards." Keith scoffed. "I'll bet you're _hoping_  someone's waiting for you just so you have an excuse to let off a little steam."

Pidge grinned as they closed in on the vent. "You know me too well." They fell silent after that, letting Hunk run over the layout of the base once more. Pidge had studied it for themself before they headed out, of course, but Hunk was anxious and bored, and talking Pidge through the infiltration helped keep him calm. They'd all brought their lions and hidden them behind a neighboring planet--cloaked, as an added layer of protection. But until Pidge's team finished--or got caught--there was nothing for the others to do.

Pidge tried to be careful on the final approach to the vent--no kicking the walls, no banging their head on the low ceiling--but vents were, by nature, a noisy way to travel. The metal bent and groaned under their weight, and every sound echoed off the walls, doubling and tripling in volume.

They were five feet from the vent when it suddenly disappeared, a head and shoulders appearing through the opening.

" _Shit_ ," Pidge hissed as they locked eyes with the Galra--a manager or lab tech or something, rather than a guard, judging by the lack of armor. That was good.

The fact that they'd found Pidge? Not so much.

Voices exploded in their ear, frantic and demanding, and Pidge turned the volume down to a whisper with a fleeting thought as they summoned their bayard. Thank god for weapons that didn't need to be holstered. Their opponent fumbled for a weapon of his own, but the narrow vent made maneuvering difficult. There wasn't enough room for their grappling hook to be of much use, but there was a blade on the tip of it. A little awkward, but...

Their bayard seemed to understand the trickiness of the situation, thankfully, and instead of the grappling hook-katar, it resolved into a compact pistol. Pidge grinned and shot the man between the eyes. As he dropped, they surged forward, abandoning all pretense of silence to reach the opening and dive through head first.

They managed to tuck and roll as they fell, and if the landing wasn't graceful, it at least didn't snap their neck. A laser burned a hole in the tile beside them as they rolled, and they yelped, scrambling to their feet before anyone could get another cheap shot in. They'd dismissed their bayard as they fell on instinct, and they summoned it again now, the familiar form of the grappling hook falling into their hand with ease. They fired as soon as they identified another vertical figure, their vision still spinning a little from the fall.

Their aim was good enough. The tether made a loose, lopsided loop around the woman, and Pidge jolted her with enough electricity to make her drop her gun. At motion behind them, they turned, slinging the woman into the room's third and final occupant, a man who had been reaching for his ear--a comm device, undoubtedly.

It was over as quickly as it had begun--three dead officers kicked to the corner as Pidge dropped into a chair near the bank of monitors and control panels. They turned the volume back up on the comms as they got to work. "Sorry about that. Little bit of a scuffle in the security room, but I took care of it."

"Guards?" Keith asked.

Pidge glanced over their shoulder. "No. Just whoever they had stationed here. I'm pretty sure I took them down before they had time to call the guards. Don't see any alarms, anyway."

Shiro breathed out a long, slow breath, and Allura hummed. "Good work. Let us know when you have the defenses down."

"Way ahead of you," Pidge said, eyes flitting from screen to screen. There was only so much they could shut down without drawing attention to themself, but the alarms on the external doors, and on the security checkpoints leading from the residential and administrative areas into the research complex at the heart of the lab wouldn't be missed. The cameras could be looped in case there were other security booths watching the halls. They opted to wait on the sentries--better to save that for after they'd already been discovered, rather than tip their hand--but they did transfer the monitoring system to their armor so they could bring up a map of all sentries' current locations. "Aaaaand _done._ " Pidge pushed back from the security station.

Meri perked up at once. "We good to come in, then?"

"Front door should be unlocked and everything. I'm headed that way right now--got the sentries' positions on my map so we only have to worry about the live staff."

Meri grunted an acknowledgement, and then they were on their way, Pidge pulling the sentry map up onto their visor display so they didn't have to keep looking down as they crept through the halls. For all this was a robeast manufacturing lab--once the Empire's primary means of combating Voltron--it seemed... well, empty. Pidge only ran into one patrol in the halls, saw no signs of life in the rooms around them. Maybe everyone was in the middle of a shift in the research area right now, but there should have been guards off duty, if nothing else.

They pulled up the BLIP-tech scan while they were hiding in a storage closet waiting for the solitary patrol to pass, and frowned at what they saw. Fewer than a dozen vital signatures in the outer wing. More than that north of here, in the research wing, but not by much--though the signatures from the robeasts themselves made it difficult to count. Looked like somebody had cut funding to this place, maybe straight up reassigned half the staff.

With Dark Voltron and the Vkullor both in play, Pidge supposed it only made sense. Robeasts were yesterday's big thing, and they were rapidly becoming obsolete. No wonder that last wave of them had been so easy to tear through.

They found Keith and Meri several corridors deep into the complex and waved them along. They took the most direct path they could find to the checkpoint between wings. No reason to waste any more time than necessary. The only reason they were in here at all was because they needed to find the locations of the other labs. Pidge's dad had only been able to find these coordinates, but he said the files named three other locations, with the implication of a couple more on top of that.

Now, Vindication may have grown out of Project Robeast, but the two were almost entirely separate at this point. Sam could go on looking for more coordinates for them, but Pidge didn't think any of them was expecting to find anything. But here inside a robeast lab?

Well, they were hoping. Had the funding cuts forced the labs to share resources, or made them more competitive, guarding their findings closely in an effort to impress Haggar and get a few extra bodies?

Probably the latter, to be honest, but if there was any communication at all between labs, Pidge might be able to trace the signals back to their origin point. Hopefully.

"Okay, we're through the checkpoint," Meri said. "Onto step two."

Pidge glanced over their shoulder as they left the checkpoint behind. Not so much a checkpoint these days. There was a security booth that looked like it was supposed to be manned, but it was empty now. The scanner by the door was supposed to check biometrics and only allow authorized personnel through, but with that down, there was nothing to stop the paladins from waltzing right on in.

Good to see lean staffing even screwed over evil alien empires.

They checked a few rooms as they progressed through the research wing, relying on the BLIP-tech to keep them away from occupied rooms and taking their best guesses at which rooms on their scans might have a computer for Pidge to jack into. (The answer, apparently, was none--or at least none that weren't full of guards, druids, and lab techs all ready to blast a couple of paladins full of holes.)

So they moved on, pressing deeper and deeper into this wing--and closer and closer to the robeast bays. The robeasts' Quintessence messed with the BLIP-tech and with the structural scans they'd done. The farther the went, the more degraded their map, and the less certain they could be about the accuracy of the BLIP-tech readings. They'd counted at least twenty bays from the air, clustered together like a bunch of grapes and choking the air with an influx of Quintessence.

"They _definitely_ used to have more equipment than this," Pidge said, staring at another mostly-empty room. There were desks along the walls, even a few control panels that didn't seem to connect to anything, but which had been shoved all together in one corner. "We shouldn't be having this much trouble finding a computer."

"We'll have to go deeper," Keith said. "Doesn't even look like they use this area of the lab anymore. They probably moved everything useful closer to the active labs."

"And closer to the remaining staff," Meri said. "Fun."

"Just be careful," Shiro said. "You're going in blind here pretty soon. Take it slow and watch your backs. Remember, there's no rush."

Not any more than usual, he meant. There was always a little bit of a rush, what with the entire universe being on fire and the paladins being some of a very small number of fire fighters out there. Just because there had been no emergencies this morning didn't mean it would stay that way.

They breathed, and continued on--more slowly now than before. Meri took the lead, her sharper hearing and sensitivity to Quintessence giving her an edge when it came to picking up on anyone who might be waiting for them up ahead. The lab was set up strangely, even by Imperial standards. Usually these labs were at least symmetrical, even if corridors split at odd angles and dead ended in random places. This place felt like it had been build bit by bit--or maybe dismantled over time. Hallways now led nowhere at all--just to a door covered over by a steel plate with, as far as anyone could tell, nothing but open air on the other side.

Clusters of rooms had been plonked down in the middle of the lab seemingly at random, self-contained and interconnected but with no hallway to circumvent them. These slowed them down the most, as they had to wait for people to clear out or slip from empty room to empty room, backtracking when they found a small horde of druids hard at work on... something.

For once, Pidge didn't want to know what was going on.

They cleared another lab cluster that was too full of people to make for a good place to hunker down and then, finally, they got lucky. A small, dark room that opened off the main corridor but wasn't connected to any lab, empty of people but full of computers just waiting to be cracked wide open. Pidge grinned as they settled in, extending a cord from their gauntlet that would let them access the system through a more familiar interface.

"I think we finally found something," Keith told the others while Pidge worked, Meri leaning over their shoulder. "Pidge is looking for the coordinates now. Hopefully they're there to find."

"They will be," Pidge said, distracted. "Even if these people don't think they are."

They'd hardly had a chance to get started before the door hissed open, spilling light and long shadows in from the hallway. Keith hissed, Meri cursed, and Pidge turned as static filled the air.

* * *

The air thrummed with latent Quintessence, raising the hairs along Meri's arms and turning her stomach. She tackled Pidge out of their chair, dropping to the ground as a fork of lightning split the air overhead. It burned through the monitor Pidge had been seated at, shattering the frame and melting the controls around it. A sharp, metallic taste hung in the air.

It reminded Meri too much of blood.

Keith roared as he tore into the druid who had attacked, but he flickered away in a puff of black smoke, reappearing on the other side of the room straddling Meri and Pidge, lightning crackling between his palms. Keith cried out, but there was more motion at the door, more druids crowding in--Meri could tell from the oil slick of their Quintessence that oozed out to fill the room and called out to something dormant inside her.

Snarling, she twisted, shifting as she did into a double-joined Flyxian so she could hook her feet around the druid's ankles and take him down. His lightning spluttered out as he fell, eyes widening behind his mask, and Meri shifted again, this time to a Balmeran, as she grabbed the druid's head and smashed it with her own.

The druid's mask cracked down the center, and he fell to the ground, dazed, giving Meri and Pidge time to scramble to their feet. Meri's facemask had cracked, as well--not as completely as the druid's mask, which lay on the ground in two pieces--just a small chip between her eyes with a hairline crack trailing off it, but she was glad she'd shifted before she tried that, or she'd probably have wound up as dazed as the druid.

Keith was fighting two more druids by now, dodging between them and daring a few attacks here and there. None of them landed, but so far he seemed to have avoided most of their attacks in return.

Meri's lip curled, and the bayard fell into her hand as she charged. Molten light spread across both hands, solidifying into a pair of gauntlets. There was a satisfying _crunch_ as her fist connected with the nearer druid's ribs, flinging him into the wall before he'd realized she was there.

Lightning flashed, and Meri raised her hands, the gauntlets catching the lightning with ease. They absorbed the excess energy, which pooled in the joints, snapping purple sparks as she flexed her fingers. She smiled as the druid stared on in shock, but he recovered before she could close the distance between them. He flickered away, then flickered away again as Pidge's bayard shot out toward him, already crackling with electricity.

Meri clenched her fist, stepping back to track both druids at once. They were hard to hit if they saw you coming. Best bet was to catch them by surprise and hope you hit hard enough to put them down for good.

A klaxon split the air, high and sharp enough to make Meri cringe. The flashing lights that followed even more so. She threw herself aside as one of the druids took advantage of her distraction, and sparks flew as black lightning destroyed another large section of the computer bank behind her.

"Okay, I think it's safe to say our cover's blown," Meri said. "Everyone be ready. You might have company soon." She glanced over her shoulder. "And we're going to need to find another computer."

* * *

Meri wasn't kidding when she said they were going to have company. Lance's stomach dropped as he watched dozens of pinpricks of light swarm the BLIP-tech display: robeasts pouring from the lab like angry hornets.

"Everyone, keep your cloaks up," Allura ordered. "They know three paladins are here, and they probably suspect the rest of us are nearby. That doesn't mean they know where we are."

"We move in quietly," Shiro said. "Let the robeasts spread out, and destroy as many of them as we can in the first attack. Ready?"

Lance tightened his grip on the controls and reached out to Nyma, who was already settled in the gunner's nest above the cockpit. She was more settled than him, her eyes and her mind sharp, every ounce of her ready for battle. Lance settled his own nerves and nodded, moving in when Shiro gave the word. All five Lions had been gathered behind the same planet, and they split off in different directions, closing in on the swarm of robeasts without a word.

"There are so many," Shay whispered, uncertainty making her voice quaver. "And there are more labs than this?"

"They won't be as strong as the old ones," Matt said. "We already saw that. We wiped out their stores on New Altea, and they've cranked out so many since that they probably can't risk sending one or two out alone."

"You think they were stockpiling them?" Val asked. "Going to try to overwhelm us like they did before?"

Lance nodded slowly. "That battle a few weeks ago could have been a test run. Maybe each of these labs is preparing for a single coordinated strike."

"Or a whole slew of them at once," Nyma added. "Send out fifty robeasts to fifty worlds? Think of how much damage that would do before we could get to them all."

Lance didn't want to think about that--but that was why they were here, after all. Destroy the robeasts before they could be deployed, and they'd save a whole lotta lives.

Blue was still a good distance away when the first robeast turned her way. Lance tensed, his fingers going to the triggers. "Hey, guys? I think some of these things might be able to see through our--" He cut off with a cry as the robeast opened its mouth and spat a ball of blue-white plasma at him. He swerved to avoid it, and Nyma took the robeast down with a clean shot to the head.

"Forget quiet," Shiro said. "Paladins, attack!"

Lance didn't need to be told twice. He opened fire, blasting any robeast that came close as he tore through the swarm. Only about one in ten seemed to be able to see through the cloak, and those with varying degrees of clarity--but they targeted the cloak generator with a laser focus while the rest scattered, raining fire on his general location every time he or Nyma took a shot. The robeasts, for the most part weren't particularly tough. They took a few hits to go down, sometimes, but they were slow, and Lance could fire off a burst as Nyma took more careful aim, and then he'd reposition them before the retaliation came. The others, it seemed, were doing more or less the same thing.

It only lasted until the first cloak fell--Green's, as it happened, either because Val was flying solo or just by bad luck. She swore, and every robeast in the area turned its fire on her.

Matt dropped his shield a split second later, tearing through the center of the swarm with a burst of flame that seemed more designed to draw attention than destroy enemies. (If that was his plan, it worked, and he took off toward open space with three dozen robeasts on his heels.)

"This isn't working," Allura said. Shiro dropped their shields about the same time Lance and Shay did the same--they didn't need to be told there were too many robeasts here for two lions to distract. They'd only be swarmed, and even weak robeasts could be fatal if there were enough of them.

Even before Allura gave the word, Lance saw what she was thinking. They couldn't risk splitting up, each of them overrun by a dozen robeasts or more. It would be too easy to be overwhelmed, and odds were slim that any of the rest of them would be able to go to a flagging lion's aid.

"Everyone, together. Form Voltron!"

* * *

Meri had forgotten what tough bastards druids could be. Sure, she'd almost died the last time she went up against them, but it had also been her against an entire freaking coven of them, so that was only to be expected. There were only two now, against three paladins, and they were still barely holding their own. Keith was quick and light on his feet, but he couldn't land a hit with his opponent teleporting all over the place.

Meri and Pidge were faring a little better just because there were two of them, and their druid couldn't always disappear fast enough to avoid an attack--but he was still up, still moving, and he'd started blasting lightning at every opportunity. Didn't even seem to care if he hit his friend by mistake, so long as it kept Meri and Pidge busy.

Mostly Meri, to be fair. Her gauntlets insulated her from the magic well enough--though they burned hot against her skin as they absorbed more and more energy with no way to let it out--and she planted herself in front of Pidge, who had no such defense.

The druid aimed his next attack at Keith's unprotected back, and Meri threw herself to the side, catching most of the lightning. A few branches slipped past her, and Keith cried out in pain, his body stiffening for an instant before his opponent appeared at his side and kicked him backwards into the wall. Meri lashed out at him, her gauntlet trailing deep shadows through the air, but he was gone too fast.

The other druid appeared behind her, his hand closing around her throat.

"If you're going to be difficult, I suppose I'll have to do this the old fashioned way."

Meri thrashed as his grip tightened, her lungs already straining for air.

It lasted only a moment before brilliant white light filled the room. The druid screamed, his grip loosening enough for Meri to break it. She spun and found him snared by Pidge's bayard, electricity pouring into his body. Meri grinned, and slammed both fists into his chest.

The magic that had been building up inside her gauntlets, the latent energy of countless attacks, tore through him in an instant, the recoil enough to send Meri staggering back.

That was probably for the best. The discharge of magic left a vacuum in the air, a sudden, powerful void of Quintessence as the druid was bled dry in an instant. It reminded her sharply of her time in Haggar's circle, of all the things she'd learned in the name of maintaining her cover, and she shuddered, shoving aside the protests of her unsettled stomach. That was another druid down. Just one more to go.

Pidge screamed, high and breathless. It clawed Meri to the core, and she whipped toward the sound, freezing in horror as she saw a druid--the first druid, whose mask she'd broken, standing behind Pidge. One arm pinned their arms to their side. The other was wrapped around their neck, clawed fingers curling up toward their jaw.

Yellow lightning crackled again, and Pidge threw their head back. They bit down on their scream this time, but they couldn't stop it altogether, and the druid smiled, violet blood dripping from his nose, streaming from a cut on his forehead. His eyes burned into her, savage pleasure stripping away the last of her restraint.

The magic rose easily to her command, the old anticipation roaring to life under her hand. She drew it around her like a cloak, and the world dissolved to ash. A flicker, a moment of non-existence, and she was standing behind the druid, her body still only half formed as she drove her hand into his back. He stiffened, and she smiled as she clenched her hand into a fist.

Energy crackled beneath her skin, black sparks snapping at the air. Her blood roared in her ears, her soul coming alight as life itself flowed into her, drawn to her like water rushing down a mountainside. The druid spasmed, his mouth stretched open in silent horror, his breath hardly more than a papery rasp.

She felt the life leave him, but still she held on, watching as his skin cracked and crumbled, the light going out of his eyes.

With a _thump_ , Pidge dropped to the ground, having wrested themself free of the druid's grasp. They clutched at their throat, doubled over, pale and coughing and visibly trembling--from pain, fear, or both. Meri snapped out of her trance in an instant, staring at the desiccated corpse of the druid in horror for an instant before she shoved it away from her and dropped to the ground beside Pidge.

"Pidge," she whispered. "Pidge!"

They raised a shaking hand and pawed at their throat as another cough tore out of them. "Fine. I'm--I'm fine."

Meri put an arm around them anyway, her stomach turning flips inside of her. This close, they could sense how low Pidge's Quintessence levels were. She had done that-- _Meri_ , not the druid. They must have been close enough for the magic to reach them. She hadn't even realized.

The last druid appeared before them, towering over both Meri and Pidge, the magic snapping at his fingertips. Meri raised a hand, and the magic answered easily. Too easily. Meri's stomach heaved, and she flinched away from the magic within her, keenly aware of the lightning stored within her, the life she'd stolen from another living being.

The druid raised his hands.

Keith's sword split the skin of his chest, splattering purple blood across Meri's visor, but Keith didn't give her time for the horror to build. His sword cut to the side, slicing through flesh, and the druid dropped, death before he hit the ground. In another second, Keith was there, hauling both Meri and Pidge to their feet and hustling them toward the door.

"Come on," he said. "We need to get out of here."

Pidge staggered to their feet, but it took Meri another moment to tear her eyes away from the body of the druid she'd drained. The magic sang in her ears, a siren tempting her to let loose one more time, begging her to use it. Quintessence hung thick in the air, sharp enough to taste it, bittersweet and nauseating.

"Meri!"

Meri lurched upright, nodding to Keith and staggering toward the door. Pidge was equally unsteady on their feet, and Keith put an arm around their shoulders to support them, hauling them along. They passed out into the hall a few steps ahead of Meri, only to stop dead. Meri crowded in behind them as they summoned their bayard, her mouth running dry.

The base had mobilized against them. Ten more druids, two dozen soldiers, and more sentries than she could count at a glance were arrayed around them, blocking the hallway in both directions. Pidge pulled away from Keith, leaning on the door frame and gripping their bayard in both hands. Keith adjusted his grip on his sword and gathered himself to run.

There were too many.

Even if all three of them were in top shape, even without the druids, there were too many to take.

The magic's song rose to a fever pitch inside her head, and Meri seized hold of it once more. She ignored the way it crawled beneath her skin, the way her stomach roiled in protest.

They had no other choice.

She looped one arm through Pidge's, reached out to catch Keith's wrist before he could go too far. He half turned toward her, a challenge ready on his lips.

They were gone before he could voice it: the world burning away, the magic consuming everything for one suspended moment, and then they were beyond the mob.

Keith stumbled. Pidge doubled over.

Meri hauled them both along, refusing to lose the slim advantage they had.

* * *

The robeasts didn't stop coming.

The paladins' initial survey of the base had identified twenty outlying structures that, based off what they'd seen at the robeast lab on Maorel and the Quintessence readings, seemed to be robeast hangars.

What no one had counted on was that each of these hangars had apparently contained five or more robeasts.

That was their best estimate--a hundred robeasts in total, perhaps a quarter of which had been destroyed so far. It was difficult to be sure of that number in all the chaos. Maybe if they'd had Pidge in Green with Val to amplify their awareness of the world around them.

They didn't have Pidge, though. Val could sense them, down on the planet below with Keith and Meri. (That was Shiro and Allura, wasn't it? Their bond letting them reach out beyond the bounds of Voltron to keep tabs on the other paladins.)

Every mind stuck on the three on the ground--Pidge hurt, Meri panicking, Keith desperately searching for somewhere to take cover so Pidge could dig up the information they needed. Even as Voltron cut through robeasts in a constant cycle of cutting a path through, breaking free, only to be swarmed again, the paladins fought with only half a mind. They were slower than they should have been, more easily surrounded.

But they couldn't help it.

_Be safe._

No one knew where the thought started, but it echoed through every mind.

* * *

It didn't take long to find another unattended computer. The entire base seemed to be out looking for them, which meant they'd left all their equipment unattended. That was one point in their favor.

Pidge wished they had more points in their favor, but, well, it was a work in progress.

They threw themself into the chair, navigating to the sentry controller before anything else. It wasn't meant to be accessed from a random workstation like this, but Pidge frankly didn't care. They had the entire base coming for them, and they desperately needed to even the odds.

Keith had ripped the cover off the door control panel, jabbing his sword in to screw up the controls so the soldiers couldn't get in. Wouldn't stop the druids, but they'd be coming in blind. Meri, meanwhile, stood flush against the far wall, gripping her head between her hands and looking about two seconds from collapse. She'd been silent and shaking all the way here, and she still seemed to be struggling to focus. Side effects of the druid magic she'd used? Or just the memories associated with it?

Pidge had the sentries offline in under two minutes, and they moved on without a word to the real reason they'd come. Other labs. Pidge knew they existed. The only questions were how many, and where?

"Guys?" Keith called, moving away from the door and clutching his sword like he expected the druids to appear at any moment. "How's it going out there?"

"We've been better," said Matt, "but we're holding our own."

Pidge grimaced. They had schematics of the lab pulled up behind the window they were working in, but they didn't need them. The map displayed on their visor had cleared during the fight. They could only assume that meant the base had disgorged every last robeast to try to bring down Voltron. Pidge wanted to ask how many that was, but knowing wouldn't change anything.

Footsteps raced by outside the door, and Pidge tensed, their shoulders creeping toward their shoulders. They didn't dare look away from the screen, though. Not even for a second.

"Okay, well, uh." Keith fidgeted, his fingers tapping against the armor covering his thigh. "Once Pidge finds what we need, we're going to need an extraction. Fast."

"We'll be there," Akira said.

Pidge did look away then, for just an instant, locking eyes with Keith. The conviction in Akira's voice went beyond mere determination. There was no arguing with him, and  no room for doubt. If he said he would be there, he would be there--exactly when they needed him.

Pidge was grateful he was there, though he wasn't supposed to be, not at first. The Guard was on alert right now, ready to handle any emergencies that came up while the paladins were dealing with the robeast labs, and Akira had planned on leading them. Unfortunately, nothing had changed with Red since Akira's return. Keith and Matt hadn't been able to get the lion to move an inch until Akira joined them, something that even seemed to surprise Akira. He wasn't Red, but _she_  wasn't in the lion, either, so here they were.

Coordinates for two of the other labs were easy to find. The staff here had transferred test subjects out some time ago and still had the manifests that listed living beings as cargo--but also listed the destination, coordinates included. So... that was something.

But they knew there were more labs out there.

The scent of lightning preceded the druid's arrival by a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Keith to start moving, his sword cutting toward the smoke as it coalesced just inside the door. 

The druid went down with smoke still leaking from the tips of her fingers, her head landing a foot away.

There was no time to celebrate as two more druids appeared an instant later. Keith continued on to meet them, stepping lightly over the fallen druid's body, and Meri's hands crackled with latent energy as she roused herself to join in the fight. Pidge only hunched over the keyboard, continuing their hunt for information. They would never be able to take down the entire base's staff on their own, so the best thing Pidge could do was find what they'd come for so they could all get out of here.

They just hoped they extraction arrived in time.

* * *

The battle in the sky raged on. Voltron cut down robeast after robeast, never slowing. The robeasts flung themselves at them, tossing Voltron about, clawing deep gouges in their armor, sometimes caving it in. More than one robeast rammed them with such force they tore themselves apart, flesh rending, metal peeling back.

But they didn't stop. Haggar hadn't designed these things to care about self-preservation, and she hadn't given them the ability to feel pain. The one thing that might have been a mercy, and she even manged to turn that to cruelty.

A sudden breathlessness seized hold of them, sweeping through them all in a rush as it constricted around the Red Lion's cockpit. Confusion chased the tension, but Akira had gathered himself like he was preparing to run, and Matt mirrored him.

"Wait," Shiro began.

It was too late. Two heartbeats after the impulse came, Red had split away from the others, the Voltron formation falling apart far too quickly for anyone to salvage it. Hunk and Val cried out in surprise, and Shiro's focus chased after Red, leaning on his disapproval. (Matt and Akira, of course, only shrugged it off.)

"Dude!" Lance cried. "What the heck? We're in the middle of a battle here!"

"You're going to have to hold out for a minute," Akira said, almost distracted. Red was already at the edge of the atmosphere. "The others need us."

His conviction silenced them all--it carried with it an echo of something the rest of them had never felt before. A hook tugging at his gut. A fluttering in his chest. Motion, irresistible and unstoppable, like a river plunging over a cliff. The instincts of the Red Lion, amplified by Red and Akira's union, and flooding the paladin bond.

Not just the paladin bond, though, was it? This was the _Voltron_ bond, somehow still holding even as the distance grew between them.

It was Nyma who noticed it first, but her realization raced outward along the cords of the bond, resonating in every mind. They could all still sense each other as they had a moment before.

(As they had been, more often than not, for several weeks, whether they were in the Voltron formation or not.)

What _was_  this?

There was no time to worry about it. The robeasts were still coming, wedging themselves between the lions, driving them apart, surrounding them. One rammed the Green Lion, and Lance felt the impact in his teeth. He cursed, twisting between opponents as Nyma returned to her gunner's nest and started picking them off again, one by one.

Allura turned her focus to Val as Shiro carried them through the fray, willing Val to breathe, to calm down. With luck, Red would only be gone a minute or two. They only had to hold out that long.

(It was curious, Val thought, the way she could feel Allura in the cockpit with her, a shadow behind her, a hand on either shoulder. If she turned her head, she felt she would have caught a glimpse of Shiro beside her--focused, but exuding that same calm.)

It was curious, too, how Hunk could see the stabilizer that had torn loose in the impact--minor damage, nothing Green couldn't fly without, but it would make the ride a bit bumpier. Val should be aware of that, because it might feel like something worse.

Val understood before he could speak the words aloud.

A corona ignited around the Red Lion as it entered the atmosphere, neither Matt nor Akira letting up as they skimmed low over the base. "Got it," Pidge said. "Gonna need that extraction--"

Red's back paw clipped a tower, and Matt twisted hard to the side, crashing through the roof and sliding through another several rooms before they came to a stop, shields straining, engines roaring, and the exasperation of the entire team ringing in the air as Akira laughed in delight. A druid stood in the ruins of the hall they'd come to a stop in, petrified, the robes of a second just visible beneath the rubble. A door opened as Red lowered her head toward it, and Pidge stuck their head out, bayard raised.

"That works," they said dryly, waving an arm and leading Keith and Meri out of the room and up the ramp.

As the three of them entered the cockpit, something snapped into focus. Hunk's distant fretting became something more akin to a lecture as he scoured Red for major structural damage, already cataloging minor repairs that would need to be done after this battle. Shiro strained for the same reproach, but it was tinged with amusement and affection.

Keith's delight burst loudest of all--but that loudness was in part a contrast to the chill silence that filled Meri. One part horror, one part guilt, all of it shoved down and out of the way where it wasn't supposed to bother anyone.

Matt had them in the air again the instant he'd confirmed all his passengers were on board, and Keith took up his controls as they rejoined the battle. They smashed through the robests' rear guard, blasting three of them to scrap before the swarm realized they were there.

There was a thought, somewhere among the paladins, that they should form Voltron again, now that they were all here, but it was an idle thought, and quickly petered out. It was obvious to them all that the Voltron bond, somehow, was holding. They were all aware of each other--of their thoughts, of their actions--in away they'd never experienced outside of a Voltron formation before. It felt strange to watch another lion at a distance and to feel, in some small way, in control of its actions.

Not in control.

In sync.

No one needed to take control of anyone else when they all moved as one, Red pouncing on the robeast hounding Blue, Black clearing a path for Green to escape a concerted attack by seven of the remaining robeasts. Each of them knew where the others were at all times, and someone was always there when one of the others needed help.

It was more than that, though. Their lions felt faster than usual. Their attacks seemed to hit harder. Where before it had taken as many as three or four hits for a single lion to bring down a robeast, it now usually only took one, two for some of the tougher ones. Hunk, watching from deep inside the Yellow Lion, confirmed what they all felt intrinsically.

Something had changed.

They didn't know why, or how... but this opened a world of new possibilities.

The paladins picked off the remained robeasts one by one until the skies were clear enough to raze the lab below. (They mourned the loss of life, the victims of the Empire who died with their captors, but none of them tried to stop it.)

As quiet closed in over the battlefield, the paladins regrouped. The bond resonated still, crystal clear and holding strong.

"What is this?" Pidge asked, checking the seal on their armor before they leaped from Red's mouth and drifted over to Green. Behind them, Keith traded his helmet for Meri’s cracked one, and she rejoined Lance and Nyma in Blue.

"Voltron," Allura said. "But nothing like I've seen it before."

The others agreed, all of them equally confused.

All except the lions, who rumbled with a smug sort of satisfaction, and Akira, who only chucked. "You can thank Blue for this one," he said.

"Blue?" Nyma asked. The question had the feel of an accusation, but it rolled right off Blue, who purred even louder. "Why?"

Akira lifted a shoulder. "Why did Black give her paladins the ability to communicate with the rest of you? Why did Yellow give her paladins more intimate access to her systems?" He waved a hand at the cockpit around him. "Why are we like _this_? Red figured out two paladins could access more of her potential than one, and the others followed suit."

He didn't explain it any further than that, though perhaps he _couldn't_ explain it more than. It was a nebulous concept, these things the lions could do--but even more than that, the paladins could all sense how prominent Red was in Akira right now. She hadn't overshadowed him, but she was out in force. He hadn't stumbled over his words when he spoke of Red, but there had been a flicker of hesitation in his mind, a momentary panic as he scramble to distinguish himself from her.

To delve deeper into what she and her sisters had done, right now, seemed a dangerous task, and no one was so desperate for answers that they would ask him to do it. Blue and her paladins were in tune enough to be able to extend the Voltron bond beyond the Voltron formation. For now, that was enough.

"You know," Pidge said, plugging into Green's console and loading up the data they'd mined from the lab computers. "I just so happen to have found five other robeast labs... Wanna see how far we can stretch this bond?"

* * *

"Everyone have a wormhole charged," Allura said. If the bond doesn't hold, or if it's not enough to deal with whatever defenses you find at your target, fall back. We'll regroup and take these bases on together."

There was a chorus of agreements, but stronger than that was the anticipation thrumming in the bond, a dozen minds feeding off each other and raring to see what they could do. Shiro leaned on them all once more with a warning to be cautious, and to test their limits before plunging into a fight they couldn't win, and then, he gave the go-ahead.

Five wormholes opened, poking holes into empty space. The lions disappeared into them, one after the next, the wormholes closing behind them as the paladins scattered. Shiro and Allura were the last to enter their wormhole, waiting for the bond to snap at the sudden change in distance.

It held. Just as Black had said of the adjunct bond, it cared nothing for distance once it was established. The same seemed to be true here.

Shiro and Allura waited another moment to be sure, looking out through the others' eyes as four Imperial compounds came into view. There wasn't much variation in how they were built, only where. The bottom of a canyon, a sandy basin on a barren world, the middle of a jungle, the edge of a cliff. Each planet was uninhabited, three of them unsuitable for most life. Pidge silently pointed out that the creation of a robeast required Quintessential deprivation for an extended period; the jungle base Blue had found must have been the newest, and Pidge had found records of prisoners being transferred there from the last base they had destroyed.

Otherwise, the bases were nearly identical: a serpentine central structure winding down a line of bulbous hangars. Each lab had somewhere around twenty of these hangars--but if their last battle was any indication, they probably housed a hell of a lot more robeasts than that.

The paladins didn't dawdle in the air. They moved in quickly, just as they'd all planned, striking at the hangars directly in an effort to destroy them and the robeasts inside before they could be launched.

Shiro and Allura finally forced themselves to move as the battles began. The advantage of attacking all together was that it would give the Empire no time to realize that all their labs had been compromised. They plunged in, and found their target nestled in a dried lake bed.

The lions definitely hit harder than they should have. Val could see that from the word go. Some of them already had the firepower to bring down robeasts in their bays. Black. Maybe Red or Blue, if they fired a few shots into each hangar. Yellow was geared more toward defense, and Green needed to be much closer, or to have a visual to aim for vulnerable spots. Yet even Green and Yellow were leveling hangars in a single shot, destroying most of the robeasts and leaving the rest crippled.

They could only use the bases as target practice for so long until someone inside managed to launch the remaining robeasts, of course, but by then it was too late. Yellow's target was the fastest to respond, and they'd already destroyed twelve of the twenty hangars, a thirteenth going down as the dome started to split open. Shay fell back into open space, picking off robeasts as they closed in on her. Some twenty caught up with her in space, but to her surprise she had little trouble dodging between them, and the few hits that landed hardly made a dent in their shields.

The other labs came alive one by one, each with progressively more domes destroyed. Keith, Matt, and Akira took it as a challenge to see how many domes they could take down before the robeasts launched and managed to reduce the lab to just two hangars before they ran out of time.

They took out the last nine robeasts with ease and did one last sweep of the area, firing a few more shots into the lab to be sure nothing survived, before opening a wormhole to Yellow's destination and helping clean up there.

Within ten minutes, it was over. Five labs and hundreds of robeasts down, and the lions no worse for wear. They'd fought a smaller force over New Altea, and even with reinforcements, they'd struggled far more. True, these robeasts were inferior models, but even so, the power boost the lions had going for them was impressive. None of them individually was quite as powerful as a true Voltron formation, but they were more agile, and the fact that the bond held up across multiple galaxies--well, suddenly the future of the war looked a lot brighter.

"All right everyone," Shiro said, tucking away the strategic implications for later. "Good work out there. Let's head back to the castle and tell everyone the good news."

* * *

Meri managed to keep a lid on her emotions all the way back to the castle. She didn't think for a second that the rest of the team didn't know exactly how much the run-in with the druids had shaken her, but that didn't mean she wanted to talk about it. 

Lance spent most of the flight back watching her--not with his eyes so much as his mind. She was keenly aware of his attention, and it didn't matter that he knew better than to pry; she couldn't shake the sensation of being watched, of having her guts pulled out and put on display. She lasted the whole trip mainly out of sheer spite, and as soon as she landed she was out the door, walking just to put distance behind her.

She wound up back in her room, shucking off her armor and cranking up the hot water in the shower until it was scalding. She appreciated a good hot shower to unwind, but that wasn't what this was. This was her needing to scrub off the residue this mission had left behind. She needed to feel the heat, and the scrape of her fingernails against her skin, to feel like she was peeling back layers, shedding the sweat and the grime and the magic she'd thought she'd gotten rid of months ago.

She hated how easy it had been to fall back into Keturah's teachings. How easy it was to steal Quintessence from everything and everyone around her and use it to fuel her spells. She'd bled a druid dry and not batted an eyelash--but it could just as easily have been Pidge or Keith. It almost _had_ been Pidge. If they hadn't broken free when they had...

It had been the same back when she'd been spying on the _Eryth_. Druidic magic was a force unto itself, a living thing with a will of its own. She'd heard whispers of druid trainees who turned on each other, bleeding each other dry for no reason other than to see if they could.

Meri scrubbed her skin raw, then leaned her forehead against the shower door and let the water cascade down her back. It wasn't that simple, and she knew it. Those trainees hadn't lost control of their magic any more than Meri had lost control of hers. It might have been easier if that were the case; at least then Meri would know what she had to do. Train. Train until she had it all under control.

The magic was more subtle than that. It didn't rage out of her control. Instead, it got inside her, wormed its way into her head and distorted her thinking, made her hungry for power and destruction, quieted the voice of caution that might have reigned her in.

She wasn't afraid to lose control of the magic; she was afraid to lose control of herself.

She stayed in the shower until she grew numb to the water's heat, and she started shivering the instant she left that heat behind. She toweled off and brushed her hair, and then she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Angry red furrows down her arms and across her chest where she'd scrubbed and scratched in her attempt to get clean. Ashen skin that made the shadows under her eyes look darker than they were. And the barest hint of weeping at the borders of her _glaes._

It wasn't as bad as it had been when she'd first returned from the _Eryth._  The markings didn't slice down her cheeks the way Keturah's did. But the corner was sharper, the edges uneven, like she'd ripped off a scab and blood had started to well up once more.

Meri touched her fingertips to her _glaes_ , but they felt no different than before. She wasn't sure what she'd expected--heat? Icy cold? Or maybe moisture, wet and tacky like the druid's blood splattered across her armor.

After a few moments, Meri forced herself to turn away. Her _glaes_  would return to normal soon enough, just like they had the last time, and staring at her reflection wouldn't make it happen any sooner. She finished drying off without looking at the mirror, wrapped the towel around her, and went to get some clothes.

Allura was sitting on her bed, head down, toying with the edges of her shawl. Meri stopped short, her heart leaping into her throat, and made an abortive sound of protest that drew Allura's eye.

"Sorry for the intrusion," Allura said, her eyes darting away again in an instant. "I couldn't help but noticed you'd disappeared."

Meri regained her composure and went in search of clothes, discarding her towel once she'd grabbed something, if only because she knew it would fluster Allura more than it bothered Meri, and a flustered Allura couldn't ask too many pointed questions.

Unfortunately, Allura didn't seem to be in a distractible mood today. She waited silently until Meri was dressed and then, as Meri headed for the door, Allura reached out to grab her hand.

The air in the room felt stagnant, Meri's lungs yearning for fresher air, but she stopped, not even tugging against Allura's hold. She didn't turn around, though, just stared at the door with tears burning at her eyes. "I'm not in the mood to talk it out right now, Allura."

"That's okay." Allura stood, pulling gently on Meri's hand until she turned. They were face to face now, Meri trying not to look at Allura's painfully sympathetic expression. She leaned her forehead against Meri's and settled her free hand on Meri's waist. "We don't need to talk, and we don't need to be social if you would rather stay here. I don't have any other obligations tonight."

Meri noted Allura's clothes again--one of her nicer dresses, elegant but comfortable, with a shawl drawn around her shoulders. It wasn't the sort of thing Allura normally chose to wear around the castle, but it was suitable for a post-battle address to the Coalition. Allura had probably come straight here when she was finished.

Probably she'd known exactly what Meri was feeling. She'd have seen enough in the Voltron bond to guess what the fallout would look like.

Allura was tense, her grip on Meri's hand bordering on painful though Meri knew she was trying to hold back. The hand at Meri's waist felt as light as a butterfly, and just as likely to take flight.

Meri relented, melting against Allura and holding her for several long moments as she fought back her tears. She didn't want pity, and she didn't want to talk, but if it was just Allura, just offering some company--well, Meri could certainly use that.

They made their way to the armchair in the corner, Allura making herself comfortable before pulling Meri down on top of her. It was more than a little cramped for the two of them, but Meri didn't mind. It was warm, and she could curl up without wondering whether she looked pathetic doing so. They held each other until their tension bled away, leaving Meri a sleepy puddle in Allura’s arms.

Until someone knocked on the door, and all her tension came rushing back in. Allura shifted, but Meri stopped her with a hand on her chest and glared her into silence. Whoever it was, Meri didn't want to see them right now. The revulsion she'd felt earlier had mostly faded, but that didn't mean she wanted to explain herself to anyone, or deal with them asking if she was all right, if she needed anything, if she wanted to _talk._

"Meri?"

Akira was, perhaps, the last person Meri had been expecting--Coran and Lance topped that list, to be perfectly honest, with Rosa almost directly behind--but the shock factor alone was almost enough to get her up out of the chair.

She caught herself in time and settled defiantly back in, her mouth stubbornly shut, her eyes fixed on the far wall.

"Meri, are you in there?" Akira asked again. "I'm sorry to bother you, but I won't be long. I just wanted to give you something."

Meri pursed her lips, but Akira knocked again after a few moments of silence. Either he knew she was in here and was only asking to be polite, or he was just stubborn, and either way, she doubted he'd go away on his own. Not soon enough to avoid winding her up all over again.

With a sigh, she clambered out of the chair and stalked to the door, checking to make sure she had a sour--but composed--shift in place before she hit the button to open it.

"What do you want?" she asked, letting her exasperation run wild to cover the deeper, more personal frustration she felt.

Akira smiled at her, sympathetic, but he didn't ask how she was doing or offer her a shoulder to cry on. All he did was hold out a box wrapped in shiny purple paper. "For you."

Meri took the box, which was just slightly too large to hold comfortably in one hand. "What's the occasion?"

"Belated birthday present," he said.

Meri arched an eyebrow. "My birthday isn't for another two months."

Akira adopted an exaggerated look of surprise, lifting one hand to cover his mouth. "Is that so? And... what day was it, again? Exactly?"

With a scoff, Meri tucked the box under her arm and shifted her weight to the same foot. "What, and let you plan some ridiculous surprise party? Yeah right. There's a reason I haven't told you already."

Akira spread his hands in a shrug, flashing a self-effacing smile. "Ah, well. It was worth a try. I'd been working on that for a while, anyway," he said. "Got a little side-tracked by, you know. Becoming one with the Red Lion and all that." He scratched his cheek. "Finally remembered to reserve an hour with the 3D printer."

That didn't make it any less weird for him to show up with a present on today, of all days, but however long Meri waited, there didn't seem to be any more of an explanation forthcoming. "Uh... okay?"

"Okay!" Akira flicked a wave, then turned on his heel and walked away. "See you later!"

Meri watched him go, then retreated back into her room, contemplating the box under her arm and whether she was going to regret opening it. Allura had sat up in the arm chair, watching curiously as Meri sat on the edge of the bed and shook the box. Whatever was inside was fairly light, but it rattled around with only the faintest rustle of paper, like Akira had thought about cushioning whatever was inside but hadn't cared enough to do so _well_. The tag stuck to the top of the box read, _For Naomi._

Despite herself, Meri laughed. "Ah, what the hell," she said, and tore open the package, letting the wrapping paper fall to the floor as she pulled the lid free.

Two flying saucers greeted her inside, simplistic but immediately recognizable, a few accents painted blue and green, a bunch of cheap luminous crystals attached around the rim of each saucer and spotting the dome. On one, the words, _I believe,_  had been etched in big block letters. On the other, the words read, _The truth is out there._

They were ridiculous and kitschy and somehow even cheaper than the sort of thing she expected to find in a roadside tourist trap near Area 51, and despite it all, they made Meri smile. A length of string was tied around a loop on the top of each saucer, and Meri hung them from a hook on the overhang over her bed. The hook was intended for a curtain rod, in case the occupant wanted more privacy or less light while they slept, but Meri figured a couple of dorky glowing UFOs was infinitely better.

She caught Allura smiling at her from the armchair across the room and scowled. "What?"

Allura, though, only shook her head. She stood, crossed the room, and brushed her fingers along the glowing crystal rim of the nearer UFO before extending a hand to Meri.

"You want to go get some food?"

Meri hesitated, part of her still leaning toward staying here and pretending the rest of the universe didn't exist. But Allura was offering, and Meri needed to rib Akira about his cute little arts and crafts project, so she heaved a sigh, accepted Allura's hand up, and trudged toward the door. "Okay, fine. But if people start asking questions, I expect you to punch them in the nose."

"I'm not punching anyone in the nose."

"At least get me ice cream as an apology."

Allura laughed and passed her in the hallway, grabbing her hand to tow her along. "Let's wait and see if I need to apologize first, okay?"

"Technicalities," Meri muttered. "Fine."

They shut the lights off as they left, Akira’s UFOs winking at them for another moment before the door slid shut.


	31. Do The Impossible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keena has abandoned the Voltron Coalition, building a secret alliance of her own to support her bid to take control of the Empire. Meanwhile, the paladins finally have a workable plan on how to track the Vkullor, thanks to Akira and the fuzzy lines between his memories and Red's. All they need now is a chance to put their plan into action.

"You keep asking us to trust you," Skeffin said. "You promise you have a plan, a way to end this war without the bloodshed that comes with open rebellion." She leaned forward, her hood and the lighting obscuring her face. "How much longer are we supposed to wait?"

Keena resisted the urge to scowl at the woman--a coward, like far too many of her allies. Even those who represented worlds that had formally removed themselves from the Voltron Coalition were too frightened to show their faces at this meeting. None had agreed to meet in person. Keena hadn't expected them to; it was difficult enough to meet with them one-on-one. But all of this subterfuge--the cloaks and hoods, the masks, the digital distortion and holograms that were too painfully fake to convince anyone-- _that_  Keena hadn't expected, and it disgusted her.

At least some of these people--Skeffin included, she admitted grudgingly--had valid reasons for their caution. She hailed from the planet Myvalla, and she was but one member of the planetary council. A powerful one, yes, but not so powerful she couldn't be brought down if the wrong person discovered she'd been talking with a traitor to the Coalition.

"I understand you're frustrated," Keena said, gesturing for calm. "Believe me, I wish this process was faster just as much as you do. Our campaign will gain momentum as more people lend their support. We've accomplished more in the last two weeks than we did in the two months before that."

This wasn't, strictly speaking, true. Keena had been busy, and she was making progress--but that progress was all bringing her back to where she'd _been_ two months ago. She wasn't breaking new ground--but she would be soon. She just needed these cowards to stop hedging their bets and commit.

"The Empire certainly doesn't _seem_  any more friendly than before," said Ge'xun, the representative of the Il'qek monarchs. They couldn't even be bothered to voice their own concerns, though Ge'xun, at least, hadn't bothered to obscure his face. "Remind me which of the Princes is on our side?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that. The Empire has spies everywhere--they even had one inside the Castle of Lions. What do you think happens if word of this gets back to Zarkon?" She shook her head, continuing on before anyone gathered the courage to challenge her. "We are close to making our move, I swear. But once we do, my attention will need to be on other matters. I want to ensure that our alliance is secure before we begin."

She wanted to be sure her support wouldn't vanish into the wind at the first sign of trouble while she was busy worming her way to the top of the Galra Empire, but if she said so to these cowards' faces, they would make a huge show of being offended so they would have a ready excuse to bow out of the alliance.

"You're saying you'll have news for us soon," Clieran said.

"Very soon."

Clieran nodded. "Then we'll have an answer for you then." He vanished in a little prick of light, and one by one, the other projections did the same, until Keena was left alone at her kitchen table, curtains hung all around to disguise the plainness of her surroundings. Only a select few knew she was living in gifted accommodations, and Keena would like it to stay that way. Perception was key in the political game, and her potential allies needed to see someone in control, someone with the resources and connections to wrest control of the Empire away from Zarkon.

She needed to step up her timetable. For months, her contacts had been content to watch and wait, to stay on the fence until they saw where the chips fell. Now, not so much. She'd hoped for a better turnout today--just sixteen of the thirty she'd invited--but she contented herself with the knowledge that people were watching, even if they didn't want to get involved.

The novelty of her proposition had worn off by now, and Karen's scheme had stripped Keena of much of the authority she should have had. She needed to give them something concrete, and soon, or she'd be left without a foothold in the race for control of the universe.

* * *

"Seriously?" Pidge asked, blowing metal shavings from the piece of casing they'd just finished cutting and holding it up to the light. "We destroy five, maybe six _hundred_  robeasts in the span of three hours, and that's still not good enough for these people?"

"Oh, they're all _very_  impressed." Allura's voice was dry, her diplomatic smile chucked down the garbage chute after her latest Coalition conference call. "Several world leaders made a point of congratulating us on the victory, in fact. It just doesn't _change_ anything."

Matt snorted, not looking up from the crystal matrix he was shaping. "Of course not. The robeasts haven't had a chance to do any real damage yet."

"And people are never as thankful for preventing a problem as they for fixing the one they've had time to work themselves up about." Hunk grabbed a pair of lenses that highlighted Quintessence and checked over another one of the crystal matrices. They were the heart of the probe they were building--not crucial to the actual tracking but rather to keeping it linked with the duplicate they were about to make.

"Please," Pidge said, stretching until their back popped. "People are never grateful, period. Just watch--one of these days, we're going to kill that Vkullor, and people will just complain about how long it took us to do it."

Coran breathed a laugh that said he agreed, though he kept his head down and kept working. He, like Matt and Hunk, was pieing together a matrix. It had taken a few days to get the design right, and it was still tricky to assemble. The four of them had rotated through this workshop for a few weeks, each taking turns working on the probe design, designing the hooks that would keep it anchored to the Vkullor, calibrating shields to protect both copies from any stray radiation or cosmic debris it might run into out there. They were assembling multiple probes just to be sure, but they wanted these things to be sturdy.

The link matrix had been the real puzzle, though. Metal didn't hold Quintessence well--most metal didn't. That stuff from Klenahn was interesting that way, and Pidge had managed to coax a few samples from the Olkari team stationed there, in addition to the panel and lens they'd brought back from their last visit, but they were still a long way from knowing how to work with Quintessence-infused mystery metal.

Next time.

For now, they'd settled on the crystals, and after snagging Allura to infuse two dozen prototypes, they'd finally found one that didn't leak Quintessence like nobody's business. Val had duplicated it two days ago now, and all the readings they'd taken since had pointed to this being the winning design.

"How is it really?" Coran asked. "Aside from the griping."

Allura made a face. She didn't technically need to be here, not yet, but she knew they were hoping to finish the probes tonight, and she apparently appreciated the chance to rant about the Coalition. Pidge couldn't blame her. There was a reason they steered clear of politics.

"Taking out those labs _did_ help," Allura said. Sounded like she was pulling teeth to get the words out, but she got there. "The Coalition seems more stable today than it did a week ago. It's not _enough_ , in the long run, but I did hint that we have solid plans on the way to deal with the Vkullor."

"Hint?" Matt asked.

"I'm not willing to reveal Klenahn just yet," Allura said. "Not until we know how it works and have it up and running. The odds of rumors getting back to Zarkon and him figuring out what we're up to outweigh the good it would do for morale. If we get desperate, we'll see, but until then, I'd rather keep it under wraps."

"Especially since we're so close to finishing with this," Hunk said. "Once we get these duplicated and planted and can show the Coalition that we're tracking the Vkullor, things should _actually_ calm down a little."

"That's the hope." Allura dropped her chin into her hand and went back to watching them work, as she had been doing mostly in silence for the last forty-five minutes. She'd parked herself on the edge of the other table--the one that _wasn't_  littered with scrap metal, rejected crystals, tangles of wires, and discarded tools. Her legs kicked at the air as she watched, slumped over. She didn't look very much like a princess right now--not that anyone here minded. It was all the stress, piling up over months and months. Not even Allura could bear it all the time.

Fortunately, Matt finished up the last of the crystal matrices just a few minutes later. Allura infused them all, Pidge tested them, and then it was just a matter of fitting everything together inside the casing.

After that, all they had to do was wait for the Vkullor to show its ugly face.

* * *

"Repairs are coming along about as well as can be expected," Thace said, "considering the state of this place."

"You were clearing out the place first, right?" Shiro asked. "Did you need any more help with that part? The sheer tonnage of rock and ruined machinery you have to move--"

"Is slow going." Thace shook his head. "But we've dug down to most of the important structures, according to Aransha's blueprints, and we're chipping away at the removal while the experts investigate the machinery."

Karen tapped one finger against her cheek and studied him. The Olkari had more or less taken over operations on Klenahn. They had the technical know-how that only a select few from beyond their borders could boast, and no one from the castle could dedicate the kind of time the repairs demanded. Shiro and Allura had decided to hand the project off to Aransha, with Thace there as a consultant and a liaison for the paladins.

For her part, Karen was perfectly happy to leave it to someone else, particularly when the two in charge of the operation were well versed in the value of tight lips. She wasn't concerned with word getting out--nor, so far as she could tell, were Shiro and Allura. And what took a load off their shoulders took a load off Karen's.

"Have you learned anything yet?" Karen asked.

"Your theories seem to have some merit to them," Thace said. "The panels absorb Quintessence and focus it through the lenses to the structures in the center of the chamber. We're not yet certain that the Klenna's _intent_  was to build a weapon, but the machine can very easily be weaponized."

"But is it strong enough to stop a Vkullor?" Shiro asked.

Thace tipped his head, a wry smile tugging at his lips. "That is the question, isn't it? What about your end? Pidge had wanted to look at that panel, didn't they?"

"They wanted to," Karen said. "I don't think they've had the time."

"Understandable."

As the conversation hit a lull, Karen noticed Shiro, who seemed to have grown distracted by something on the screen before him. Karen waited for him to shake himself out of his distraction, and when he didn’t, she offered Thace a bracing smile.

“Well, we won’t take up any more of your time. Let us know if you need anything, or if you make any new progress.”

“Of course,” Thace said. “Until next time.”

He ended the call, and Shiro still didn’t look up from his screen. Karen waited another few moments, then stood and went to stand at his shoulder. He had the feed from several security cameras pulled up, but it took Karen a moment to figure out what he was looking for.

“Please don’t tell me you’re spying on Akira,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Shiro jumped, hiding the camera feeds with a flick of his wrist as he spun toward her. He at least had the decency to flush, now that he realized he’d been caught. “It’s not spying,” he said.

Karen stared at him.

Shiro’s eyes slid to one side. “Layeni messaged me saying he’d skipped out on Guard training. This isn’t the first time he’s done that since he came back to us. I just wanted to know where he’s going.”

“You could try asking him.”

“And tell him Layeni’s been ratting him out? No thanks.” Shiro deflated. “I just want to know that he’s going to be okay.”

Karen sighed, settled her hands on Shiro’s shoulders, and waited for him to look up at her. “He will be. You just need to trust him enough to _talk to him_ when you have concerns.”

“I know. You’re right. It’s just… hard. Sometimes.”

“The most important things in life often are.” She gave him a lopsided smile, patted his shoulder twice, then reached past him and closed out of the security cameras altogether. “That was the last call we needed to make right now. Go take a break, before you run yourself into the ground.”

* * *

"You're getting pretty good at that."

Luz yelped, and it was a good thing the gladiator had already deactivated itself, because she dropped her training sword with a clatter that made her cringe as she turned toward the door. Akira stood there, visibly trying not to laugh at her, his hands shoved into the pockets of his Guard uniform.

She really needed to find somewhere else to train.

"Commander Shirogane!" Edi cried, snapping to attention like Akira cared about stuff like that. Luz didn't know him _super_  well, but she'd seen him around--with Lance, with Keith, with Coran. Wherever he was, he seemed incapable of taking himself seriously.

Luz honestly couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anyone call him Commander Shirogane. It was so formal it was almost funny.

Edi wasn't laughing. She stood rail-straight, one hand tucked behind her back, the other, in a fist, clapped to her shoulder. She didn't look directly at Akira, but rather at the wall just beside him, her ears quivering like she was expecting him to shout at her.

With a wave of his hand, Akira walked into the training room, stooping to grab Luz's sword from the ground. "Please," he said. "Just call me Akira." He hefted the sword, seeming not to notice that Edi hadn't relaxed in the slightest. Luz was sometimes surprised Edi still wanted to train her, as jumpy as she got any time they heard footsteps outside their door. Luz was surprised she hadn't given herself a heart attack yet.

"Don't you have your own training deck?" Luz asked, itching to take her sword back.

Akira cocked his head to the side. "The Guard deck? Sure. Why?"

"Well... what are you doing over here? The paladins aren't training or anything, are they?"

(They weren't. Luz and Edi made sure of that. They usually tried to sneak in these training sessions right after the paladins' big group training finished or else when most the team was out of the castle on missions. Today, it was the former, though only about half the team had showed up.)

Akira just stared at her for a few seconds, quiet and thoughtful, until Luz started to squirm. For a second, his eyes looked funny--the light reflecting off them weird or something, gone too fast for Luz to say what it was.

Then he shrugged, flipping Luz's sword around and holding the hilt out toward her. "I dunno. Just felt like taking a walk, I guess. You been training long?"

"I guess," Luz said. "Why? You want to get me in trouble?"

Edi hissed something that was probably a warning to be more respectful or something, but Luz was too busy staring Akira back, refusing to blink. She wasn't sure she could call it a staring contest when she didn't know if Akira was in on it, but that's what it felt like.

"Getting you in trouble sounds like way too much work," Akira said. "Besides, you seem to be handling yourself pretty well. You took down that gladiator way faster than I could have at your age."

"Thanks...?" Luz squinted at him, waiting for the trick. "Did you need something?"

" _Luz_ ," Edi hissed.

Luz ignored her.

Akira spread his arms, his eyes doing that thing again. Luz was watching for it this time, so she saw the way they looked almost gold in certain lights--brighter and sharper than they really were, and fading back to his usual dark grayish greenish in a flash, like the sun breaking through a gap in stormclouds for a second before disappearing again.

"Nah, I'm just passing through. But, hey, when you're done training for the day, come find me." He turned and headed out the door, just like that, just like he hadn't just dropped a mystery invitation in her lap.

"What?" She charged to the door, hanging onto the frame and leaning out into the hallway. "Why?"

He turned, still walking away, only backwards now, and said, "I want to show you the flight sims."

He disappeared around the corner, and Luz gaped after him for long seconds before his words sunk in. When they did, she sprinted after him--stopping when she remembered the sword in her hand and dashing back to the training room. She shoved the sword into Edi's arms. "Put this away for me? Thanks, bye! Akira! Wait up!"

She charged after him, only to nearly run into him just around the corner. She veered aside at the last second, coming to a sudden stop and teetering as her momentum carried her onward. She caught herself against the wall and glared over her shoulder at Akira, who was grinning.

"Come on," he said, waving for her to follow.

Luz followed, though she didn't appreciate Akira's smug little smile or the way he'd been waiting just around the corner, like he knew she'd come running. But... she _did_  want to see the flight sims, and if she pissed him off that wasn't going to happen.

Flying had never really been Luz's dream, but growing up with Lance, it had kind of rubbed off. The way he talked about becoming a pilot, about the Garrison and the famous people who'd come out of there, Luz couldn't help but think of flying as something cool and exciting. Was it something she would ever be any good at? Probably not. But would she jump at the chance to pretend, even just for a day?

Absolutely.

Akira led her out to Blue Tower, to the area that was dedicated to Guard training and whatever. Luz had never really come out here. No one had ever told her she wasn't _allowed_  to come here, but that was the impression they gave off. This was the Guard's area, so if you weren't in the Guard, you'd better have a good reason to intrude.

Luz had never bothered, because there was nothing over here that didn't have a closer, easier to find, and less crowded counterpart in the central structure where the paladins lived and worked. Nothing except, apparently, flight simulators.

It was a smaller room than Luz had expected, the sims. Down at the end of a lonely hallway, behind a drab gray door, was a dark, cramped room. There was a booth at the center with a single floaty chair and mounts for the holoscreens in a semicircle around it, though none of them were powered on yet. Each of the three walls besides the one with the door had two dark openings. Akira went to the booth and tapped the desk. A panel lit up, and Akira selected some option that turned on one of the holo screens.

The corresponding hole in the wall lit up, a soft blue light chasing its own tail around the doorframe and more lights twinkling deeper inside. Akira cocked his head, and Luz darted through the door into what had to be a perfect replica of a Guard ship's cockpit. There was the pilot's seat, the control panel with all its buttons and levers and knobs and more twinkling lights than a Christmas tree. The ceiling was made up of dark sloped panels that made the whole space feel a little cramped--but once Luz was in the chair, it didn't feel so bad.

Akira draped an arm over the back of her chair, head ducked so he didn't hit it on the ceiling. "Usually we start with takeoff and landing, cause if you're about to fly one of these things, those are the most important skills to know." He paused, smiling as Luz glanced up at him. "They're also the most boring, so we'll leave that for another time and skip straight to the flying part today. Sound good?"

Luz nodded, and sat up straight as Akira pointed out various things on the control panel. He told her to ignore whole sections of it--the weapons, and the comms, and the diagnostic displays. For now, he said, she only needed to worry about speed and steering, and the systems that told her where she was.

Once she had the controls down, he patted her shoulder and disappeared back into the main room. "Ready?" he called, his voice a little muffled by the cramped cockpit.

"Ready!"

A second later, the ceiling panels lit up, stars appearing out of nowhere. She saw a planet a little way ahead of her, and two moons in orbit around it. A few other Guard ships zipped about, and the screen to her left told her the castle-ship was directly behind her, like she'd just launched from the hangar.

"Go ahead and try moving around," Akira told her. "It'll feel weird at first, and it'll probably take a little while to get the hang of it, but that's okay. Even if you crash into the side of the castle, the sim will just reset you back to here and you can keep going."

Well, Luz _wasn't_  going to crash. She didn't say so out loud, but she thought it, and she leaned forward in her seat, grabbing the throttle and the yoke and easing forward. She tried to take it slow, but this little ship had a lot of power, and the lightest touch on the throttle sent her shooting forward. The sim hummed around her, pressing her back into the seat as her ship lurched forward. The ships visible ahead of her suddenly zoomed closer, then darted away as she panicked and let up on the throttle. Her ship kept cruising along even without her telling it to, drifting along and turning a little, until she could just see the castle at the very edge of the screens.

"Fast, isn't it?" Akira said, a smile in his voice. "Don't worry, though. Space is huge, so even at top speed you'll have plenty of room to maneuver."

Luz bit her lip and tried again, easing herself up to the slowest speed she could get--though she wouldn't call it slow. This time she didn't back off when the motion pressed her back into her seat, and the speed indicator slowly crept up. She remembered that Akira had told her the throttle was just for speeding up and slowing down, and she would stay at the same speed once she left off, this being space and all. She still felt a little out of control when she let go of the throttle and kept hurtling along--nothing at all like the video games she'd played where you started slowing down as soon as you let go of the gas.

Well, she was going now, so she grabbed the yoke and tried a turn. Her ship turned faster than she expected it to, and she wound up pointed more backwards than anything--but she kept going the direction she had been going, rather than moving the direction she was now facing. It was disorienting, to say the least, and she froze for a second, staring at the controls.

"Pulling out the advanced maneuvers already, huh?" Akira said. "Don't worry; turns are tricky in space. You'll need to lean on the throttle when you turn, and it's going to feel like you're swinging wild until you get the hang of it. We've all done that, so just play around with it. Have some fun."

Luz shrugged and did as Akira had suggested, accelerating through her turns. Like he'd said, she swung all over the place every time she turned, never going quite the direction she was pointed. She had to imagine she looked even wilder from the outside, but it was kind of fun to go careening all over the place. Even if she did plow into one of her fellow Guard ships by accident. Her seat rattled when she did, and the screens flashed red, but Akira must have put the sim on beginner settings or something, because the collision didn't hurt her ability to scream around open space like a madwoman, cackling as she swept in a wide, fishtailing arc around the little flag on the map that told her where she was supposed to go. 

It was an arbitrary target, anyway, so Luz didn't care so much that she couldn't hit it to save her life.

She did care, a little, when she got going too fast and one of the moons suddenly loomed up in front of her. She tried to turn, but it was too late, and she braced for impact as a rocky bluish plain rushed up to meet her.

The sim didn't try to replicate a crash, thankfully. The screens just went dark for a second, and then it all started up again from the beginning, with Luz sitting still just outside the castle.

Akira was laughing, but not cruelly. "Ten out of ten," he said.

"I crashed," Luz said, feeling like maybe she should be offended that he was laughing at her but having entirely too much fun to care.

"You did. But you crashed with style. You want to do it again?"

Of course she did. Grinning, Luz dove right back into it, picking up speed and swinging around the map with abandon. She tried to keep track of the castle and the planet and its moons this time--all three were marked on her radar, or whatever it was Alteans used. As long as she steered clear of those, she should be fine, since the sim didn't seem to care that she took out three more of her allies as she charged this way and that.

Honestly, the ships made for more interesting targets than the random flags that popped up somewhere else boring every time she happened to hit one.

"There you are!" Luz's ears pricked as Meri's voice drifted in toward her, almost in audible over the sounds of the sim around her. (It gave another harsh buzz as she plowed through her fourth ship of the run, and Luz suppressed a giggle at the sheer absurdity of it. Somehow she doubted this was how you were supposed to run the sim.)

"Oh. Hey, Meri." Akira sounded distracted, and quite a bit more subdued than he'd been the entire time they were in here. That more than anything piqued Luz's interest, and she pulled back a little on the throttle to slow herself down so she could listen to the conversation happening outside her cockpit. "What brings you here?"

"Looking for you," Meri said, like it should have been obvious. "You've been avoiding Coran for a week now; don't think we haven't noticed."

"I'm not avoiding anyone."

Meri was quiet for a minute, and when she went on, her voice was so low Luz had to strain to make it out. "It's just a quick scan, you know. He's not going to go poking and prodding, or whatever it is you're afraid of."

"I'm not _afraid._  I just think it's a waste of time."

"To update your baseline data?" Meri asked. "Akira, come on. What happens if you get hurt one of these days and we have to stick you in a pod? We need to know that Red hasn't changed anything."

"From what I hear, the pods did just fine on humans the first few times without a baseline reading. Isn't that how they were designed? To accommodate any species, known or unknown?"

"Are you calling yourself an unknown species, then?" Meri sounded like she was holding back a laugh, but the silence that followed was anything but cheerful. "Akira--"

"I'll do it later. Right now, I'm busy."

Akira's tone was so flat and cold it made Luz feel suddenly guilty for listening in, and she slammed the throttle forward, charging around the battlefield while the hushed conversation continued somewhere behind her.

By the time she crashed again and climbed out of the sim, Meri was gone, and Akira's smile seemed forced as he asked her what she thought of the sim, and how would she like to try it again tomorrow?

She agreed, of course, because flying was tons more fun than she'd expected it to be, but she couldn't help feeling like she was tiptoing across a minefield as she left the sim room and Akira behind.

* * *

It took another two days to pinpoint the Vkullor's current location, based on its last known location and trajectory and some memos agents of the Accords were able to pass along to Kolivan. It was, so far, still in the middle of nowhere, headed vaguely back toward a cluster of Coalition worlds, but too far away to know for sure what its next target was, if it even had one.

Last Val had heard, Pidge and the others had completed half a dozen probes and confirmed them all to hold a charge. All that was left now was to duplicate them and then figure out how one went about attaching a tracker to a giant planet-eating space serpent.

The Reds had already been assigned that job, thankfully, so all Val needed to worry about was bilocating with a hunk of metal the size of a toaster far enough to get the copy past the Vkullor's natural cloak.

"How far are we talking here?" Val asked. "A mile? Ten miles?"

"Way more than that," Pidge said, plugging a cord into each probe in turn to take a few last minute readings, Coran at the computer giving the okay as they did so. "Closer to one AU."

"AU?"

"Astronomical unit. About as far as it is from the Earth to the sun."

Val blinked. "Uh... The didn't have that big of a range when we found it back on Earth."

"It was also much smaller," Coran pointed out. "It needs a much larger deadzone around it now to stay off the radar."

"Okay..." Val held up a hand. "Two slight problems there. One, I can't bilocate that far. Two, wouldn't that put me out in the middle of outer space?"

Pidge spun around in their chair and kicked off the stand where they had the last of the probes sitting. "Way ahead of you." They caught themself on the wall by the comms panel and pressed a button. "All set, Nyma?"

"Just point me in the right direction and I'm good to go."

Pidge grinned at Val. "You bilocated to Blue from halfway across the universe before. We're not going to have you go quite that far this time, so hopefully you don't knock yourself flat after the first one, but it should get you as far as we need you to go."

Val crossed her arms. "That could actually work."

"Super. Coran and I will run things from here--send Nyma coordinates for where we want to plant the next tracker, do some tests to make sure everything went okay, all that good stuff. You'll get a few minutes to rest before we're ready for the next round. Feel free to set up wherever you'd like."

Val knew just the place: the hot springs at the top of Blue Tower. It had been a while since she'd done long distance bilocation like this, but she knew she was going to need to focus, which meant she needed to be somewhere far away from other people and the bustle of activity in the heart of the castle. The springs were open to the public, but hardly anyone bothered to make the trek, considering there were pools and saunas and the funky crystal version of hot tubs Alteans seemed to like scattered throughout the castle. It was usually pretty deserted up here--and today was no exception.

There was one family using the hot springs today, the kids old enough that Val didn't need to worry about screeching or splashing or anything like that, so she left them in the larger springs near the entrance and brought the trackers to the smaller pools farther back. Coran barricaded this back section for her so she wouldn't be surprised, and she settled in on the bank beside one of the springs with the probes arrayed around her on the grass.

It would have been better if she could chill in the pools, but as sturdy as these probes were, they probably weren't designed to be submerged, and she was going to need her armor once she got to the Blue Lion so she could drop the duplicated probe out the airlock. 

"Ready whenever you are," Pidge said sometime after Coran had left Val with her probes.

Val breathed through the exercises Fligg had taught her as part of her training. She hadn't had much time for meditation lately, but after a few minutes to get into the right mindset, it came back to her. Maybe all the time she'd spent in the Heart made it easier for her to quest outward toward the distant pulse of the Blue Lion, or maybe she'd just grown that much closer to Blue in the last year, but it took almost no time at all to pinpoint her location.

Holding Blue's presence in her mind, Val hugged the first probe to her chest, breathed in, and on the exhale she flung herself toward that distant spot of light.

She landed in the middle of the cockpit, cross-legged on the floor with the toaster probe in her lap. Nyma hooked her arm over the top of the pilot's seat and grinned at Val. "Cool party trick," she said.

Val snorted, climbed to her feet, and sealed her helmet. "Funny. We good for me to chuck this thing out the airlock or what?"

"Give us just a few minutes to make sure everything's working right," Pidge said. "We're getting the second signal loud and clear, but I don't want to go through all the trouble of setting this up just to find out they're not perfectly synced."

It took a few minutes, during which Val stood awkwardly in the middle of the cockpit, looking out at the stars and wondering whether she should have brought cards to pass the time.

She glanced at Nyma. "So.... Lovely weather we're having."

Nyma snorted. "You really can't stand silence, can you?"

"I'm like my cousin that way," she said with a shrug. "Like the whole family, really. Except my dad and Sebastian. They'd be perfectly happy as hermits, I swear. Everyone else? Nope. If we're not talking, we've at least got music on or something." She paused. "I don't suppose you brought any music with you? To pass the time while I rest up between jumps?"

"Honestly, I was planning on taking a nap if you needed more than a couple minutes."

Val wrinkled her nose. "You're no fun."

"All right," Pidge said. "Everything's looking good."

"You're in position and facing the right way," Coran added. His voice was a little muted compared to Pidge's, like he was running around doing a million other things, as per usual.

"What do you mean, facing the right way?" Val asked. "There's a wrong way?"

"It may not look like it, but the castle-ship is cruising through space at quite a brisk pace, which means the second that link is established, your duplicate probe over there is going to take off like an angry jiffle. We wouldn't want it smashing itself apart on Blue's armor."

That made a lot of sense--and, in retrospect, it explained why they'd told her to chuck it outside instead of leaving it somewhere easy, like the floor.

"Once you've let go of the probe, you can release the bilocation," Pidge said. "We'll send Nyma to the next spot, and if you need to rest up, we've got one of those cave panels here to examine, so don't worry about hurrying to do the next placement."

"Sounds like a plan." Val hefted the probe, which was way lighter than it looked, and headed down the ramp to the airlock behind Blue's teeth. The door to the cockpit sealed off, and Blue vacuumed out the air in this small space before opening her mouth so Val wouldn't get sucked out by the vacuum. This far from her original body, she wouldn't be able to keep hold of herself beyond Blue's walls, and if she was still holding the probe when she snapped back, she'd have to make this trip all over again.

There was no sudden depressurization, though, and Val hung on to the handhold behind Blue's teeth as she gave the probe a gentle  push out into the open.

"Package is away," she said, watching it tumble through the vacuum. "And I'm headed back."

The snapback wasn't as bad as she remembered from the last few times she'd done this, either because of the smaller distance or because of all the practice she'd gotten with astral projection. She felt it, sure. Left her a little light-headed, and she laid down for a few seconds until her body remembered which way was up. But there was no headache, and only a little fatigue, like she'd just had to run two blocks to catch a bus. She could feel it, but in a minute or two she'd be fine.

Pidge and Coran confirmed that the link was stable, and Val managed to last five minutes before the silence and stillness started to get to her. "All right, I'm good for round two," she said, grabbing the next probe, running through her breathing exercises, and sinking into the meditation to locate Blue's new position, somewhere nearly the opposite direction as before.

The process this time was the same. Brief, awkward pause in the cockpit while Pidge and Coran did their tests, fling the toaster out into space, return to home base.

There was a headache this time, albeit a weak one, and the effort actually left Val a little winded. She flopped backward on the grass and spent a solid twenty minutes trying to convince herself to do the next run before she managed to drag herself upright.

After the third one, there was no denying that she was going to need a more substantial break, and she let the others know as much before scooting over to the little panel hidden in a fake stone that let you order snacks from the kitchens. She ordered some fruit and more water than she could probably actually stomach, then switched her comms to Nyma's direct line.

"I might be a while, if you want to head back. I don't know if you had plans for the day."

"Not really," Nyma said. "Might take that nap, though."

Val hummed. "Not a bad idea." She was quiet for a while, her mind drifting with the trickle of some hidden waterfall, the simulated wind and birds overhead. It was so easy to forget that this entire place was built inside a castle-ship and not nestled in the valley of some remote mountain range. "You ever thing about what you'll do after the war?"

Nyma was slow to answer, but Val was too tired to care. "What do you mean?"

Val shrugged. "I dunno. Like, back on Earth I had all these plans for my life. Work at the local paper, get assigned bigger and bigger stories as I made a name for myself. Maybe go work for one of the major news outlets, or maybe write a book. Be the kind of investigative journalist who breaks the story of a major political scandal, or solves a cold case, or proves the innocence of someone on death row. I dunno. It all seems so silly now, like--would I have ever done any of that, or would I have just kept writing stories about local parades and petty crimes in the suburbs?

"And then for the last year and however long, my entire life has been the war. I haven't even had ten minutes to think about what 'after' might look like. It has to be even worse for people who didn't grow up somewhere the Empire couldn't reach. I mean, did  you ever even conceive of a life without the Empire when you were a kid?"

"No," Nyma said softly. "I didn't."

Val gestured toward the digital sky overhead. "Right? The plans we used to have were based on the status quo, and once we win this war, all that's going to change. I mean, it's already changed for Earth, but it'll change again. We're building a brand new universe. What do you think it'll be like?"

The silence that answered was filled with a strange sort of anticipation that left Val breathless. "I don't know," Nyma finally said. "I've never thought about it."

"Never? I find that hard to believe. You can't tell me you and Rolo never even dreamed about taking down the Empire. Didn't you have plans for after the war?"

"We were smugglers," Nyma said sharply. "Bounty hunters. We worked _for_  the Empire as often as not."

"And before that, you were rebel fighters. You fought the Empire."

"And we lost."

Nyma's voice was hard-edged and icy the way it got when Val had stumbled on a topic she didn't want to talk about, and Val shut her mouth to hold in the questions she wanted to ask. She knew Nyma had become jaded thanks to everything she'd lost in the war. She'd _been_  jaded even before that, to be honest. Val didn't know a lot about her childhood, but she knew it hadn't been the greatest.

But she had joined the rebels. She must have believed they could win, at least at first. If she didn't, then why throw her life away? What future had she been fighting for, Val wondered?

Minutes ticked by, and Val searched for something to say that would soothe whatever old wound she'd just reopened. Without knowing what it was, though, it was hard, so she let it lie, letting her body rest while her mind spun circles. The end of the war loomed closer every day, and though Val couldn't say how it would end, she chose to believe they would win. She chose to believe there was life after the Empire--and she wanted the chance to make something of it.

She wanted to make something with Nyma, and with Rolo.

It wasn't ten minutes later that it got to be too much to bear. Val sat up with a huff, her body aching all over but her thoughts chasing themselves in circles. She switched to Pidge's frequency and said, "I'm ready to go again."

"Already?" Pidge asked. "That was fast."

"Yeah, well..." Val trailed off, unsure where to take it from there. She didn't want to get into it with Pidge and Coran, but there was no way to explain her sudden need to see Nyma without a little context.

Pidge hummed in such a way that Val could picture them shrugged. "Hey, I'm not complaining. I'll get things running on this end; you go ahead and go whenever you're ready."

Val didn't need any more prompting. She _did_ almost forget to take a probe with her, but she remembered at the last second and grabbed it up before bilocating into Blue's cockpit. Blue purred a welcome, evidently already fully aware of why Val was here, and Nyma twisted, frowning.

"I thought you needed to rest."

Val set the probe aside, stood up, and silenced her comms. She marched over to Nyma's seat, where she stopped, staring down at Nyma, once more at a loss for words. "We're going to win this war," Val said, not allowing even a hint of doubt to creep into her voice. Nyma opened her mouth, but Val wasn't done yet. "We're going to win the war, we're going to get Rolo back, and it's okay if you don't know what happens next, because I don't either, but I promise you, it's going to be better than it was before."

"Val--"

"All good to go on our end," Pidge said. "Whenever you're ready."

Val didn't respond, didn't even move, just went on looking at Nyma, who was gaping at her, trying several time to say something but never making it past the first syllable.

Eventually, Nyma looked away. "I want to believe that," she said softly. "I just can't."

Val folded her arms over her stomach, her throat going tight. "I know."

"I used to, you know. Believe in happy endings or whatever. After I'd been around Rolo a few years, I started to believe anything was possible. Then all our friends died, and the Empire was as strong as ever."

"I know." Val stepped forward, bending over the back of Nyma's seat and looping her arms around Nyma's shoulders. "And I'm sorry you and your friends had to fight alone. But we're stronger now, with more allies and enough firepower to take on whatever Zarkon throws at us."

Nyma grunted, her eyes fixed on the stars outside but one hand coming up to squeeze Val's. "Hope isn't something you can reason your way into."

Val sighed. "No," she said. "I guess it's not."

She started to pull back, but Nyma held on, then turned to look at her. "When I'm with you, it's a little easier to allow for the possibility that we're not all going to die horribly."

"Is that so?" A smile tugged at Val's lips. "I'm flattered."

"You should be. The only other person who's ever made me feel like maybe life wouldn't always be horrible was Rolo."

Val managed not to tear up at that, but it took her a few seconds to regain enough composure to speak. "Well I guess that's that, then." She smiled as Nyma frowned in confusion. "Me and Rolo. If you're with one of us, things aren't terrible. Maybe if you've got both of us, we can upgrade that to 'pretty good, actually.'"

Nyma laughed, her eyes squeezing shut and the dimple in her cheek standing out the way it never did when her smile was forced. Val's stomach did a flip at the sight, and she couldn't hope to put up a fight as Nyma pulled her down into a kiss. It lasted only a moment, but Nyma didn't pull away when she broke the kiss.

"You know," she whispered. "That's a theory I might actually be able to get behind."

Val grinned, sobering only when Pidge's voice came back on the comms. "Hey, Val? Nyma? You guys still there, or did Blue trip and fall into a black hole?"

"We're here," Nyma said, somehow managing to sound perfectly composed in an instant while Val was still light-headed from the sound of Nyma's laugh. "And Val's just about to go."

She reached behind her and gave Val a shove at the same moment, and Val stumbled back to where she'd left the probe, scooping it up and sealing her helmet before pausing at the back of the cockpit to look back at Nyma and smile.

* * *

Keith was ready for a fight from the second he stepped into Red's cockpit. If all went well, there wouldn't be one--they were all certainly _hoping_ there wouldn't be one, since all of Voltron together couldn't take the Vkullor in a head-on fight, and they were only sending Red today.

But you couldn't go hunting Vkullor without expecting something to go wrong.

"Be quick, be careful, and the second anything even seems like it might go wrong, you get out of there," Shiro told them as they got in the air, Keith, Matt, and Akira silent and tensed in anticipation. Shiro was watching from the bridge together with Allura, Coran, and Pidge. "We can always try again another day, and we might not know to come help you if things get ugly."

"The comms worked last time we went up against this thin," Matt pointed out.

"And we still don't fully understand why." Pidge lifted their head from their work station to scowl at the camera, raising their voice to be heard. "We're _mostly_ sure the link among lions, or between a lion and the castle, will hold even when you're inside the Vkullor's sphere of influence, because we're _mostly_ sure those comms lines mirror the lion bonds, but that's all hardly more than speculation right now."

"There was static on your calls to the castle last time," Coran said. "And it may be worse the closer you are to the Vkullor."

"The point _is,_ " Shiro said. "We don't have a lot of information here, so we shouldn't act as though we have all the answers."

"No unnecessary risks," Akira said. "Got it."

Shiro scowled. "I don't know that I trust your definition of unnecessary here, but, yes."

"We'll be fine," Matt said. "None of us wants to cross an angry Vkullor."

Shiro sighed, but nodded. "Okay. Just--be safe."

There was nothing more to say after that. They'd already gone over the plan for this mission--several times. They had six probes sitting in a pile by the airlock, an approximate location for the Vkullor, and a brief rundown on how the probes' anchoring hooks worked. Hunk and Matt had drawn up a list of viable spots to plant their probes, but ultimately it was going to be wherever they could reach in a short amount of time.

Guilt hung thick in the air as they left the castle and opened a wormhole to the coordinates they'd been given, and Keith tried not to squirm. They'd been over this already; the choice was clear.

"Are you _sure_  you don't want me to do it?" Matt asked.

Keith glanced at Akira, who stood between the two seats, swaying with the motion of the Red Lion. Kieth could just see him out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned a little more, he saw that Akira had his eyes closed and seemed to hardly be listening to what Matt had said.

"I'll be fine," Keith said. "Your knee--"

"It's not that bad," Matt said. "I'm mostly just being paranoid. The brace has been helping, and as long as I find an outlet for my magic every now and then, there's no chance of crystals building up in the joint. Besides, most of our missions lately have been in the air--"

"And then we had one on the ground, you blew yourself up, and your knee's been bothering you ever since."

Matt cringed, and Keith wondered if he'd been too harsh. He was only speaking the truth. Matt had tried not to show it, but he'd been walking with a limp for nearly a week after Klenahn. He'd somehow managed to keep Shiro from finding out, but the first time he and Keith were back in the cockpit, Keith had felt it.

Crystal buildup, Matt explained. They'd had to put him in a pod after Klenahn--and not the modified kind that pulled Quintessence _out_  of his body. Keith was sure it had been a calculated decision--the damage to his lungs was bad enough that they couldn't just leave him to sleep it off, and Coran had put him through several cycles in the modified pod in the following days.

What Coran probably didn't know was how much time Matt had spent on the training deck that week shooting fire at moving targets until he could barely stand and his bad leg shook visibly with every step.

He insisted it was better now--and maybe it was. Keith couldn't sense any pain in the bond today, hidden or otherwise. Even so, if one of them had to go climbing around on a Vkullor's back, it only made sense that it be the one of them who wasn't recovering from a knee injury that had aggravated a much older injury and the probable nerve damage it had left behind.

(The pain, Keith could sense. It was much more difficult to know when Matt's leg was numb, or tingling like it had fallen asleep, or when his knee just felt inexplicably weak, like it might give out with the next step.)

"I'll worry about planting the probes," Keith said. "You worry about the Vkullor."

Matt cracked a smile at that; it reverberated in the bond, easing some of their mutual tension. "When you put it that way, it almost sounds like you're the one getting off easy."

"Who says I'm not? I'm not the one who needs to stick close to a Vkullor without getting spotted for however long it takes me to get these things situated."

The wormhole spit them out into empty space, but they turned in the direction the Vkullor should have been headed, and less than ten minutes later they picked out its shape in the distance, a shadow blotting out the stars.

"We see it," Keith said to the castle. "Closing in now."

It felt wrong to go in without the cloak up when they were trying not to be noticed, but all signs pointed to cloaking tech being the one surefire way to attract a Vkullor's attention. So even though Keith felt like they might as well be lighting a flare and hanging a banner to announce their arrival, they came in behind the Vkullor, pulling up alongside its back near its midpoint--far enough from the head that it hopefully wouldn't see them, but far enough from the tail that they weren't risking getting batted out of the sky by sheer misfortune.

Keith released his flight harness and headed for the back of the cockpit, exchanging tight smiles with Akira as he passed. Red was, as always, more present here in the lion than anywhere else, and that left Akira subdued, floating on the edges of the bond. He impressed confidence on Keith as he gathered up the probes, though, and Keith straightened his spine.

Pidge had fastened the probes together on a strand of Altean cable, each one already active and exuding the shield that would protect it and its double from cosmic radiation and random debris. Pidge had assured him that there was very little he could do to damage them, short of perhaps stabbing them with his bayard.

That was fortunate, because Keith's plan, at the moment, was to jump out of a moving lion onto a spine the size of a mountain, slowing his fall with his jets just enough that he didn't splatter himself all over the Vkullor's hide. If he'd had to shield the probes from harm, he would have had to return to the lion for each one individually. This was was much more practical.

Matt called out when they were in position, and Keith stepped into the airlock, one end of the probes' tether wrapped around his wrist. When Red opened her mouth, he jumped, sailing through open space toward the Vkullor's back.

He fired his jets at the last minute, but he still landed hard, rolling across the rough, stony surface and only keeping hold of the probes because of the tether around his wrist. He bounced and flew high enough to make his stomach lurch, but he fell back down a moment later, landing a little more gently than the first time. The Vkullor was massive enough to have a noticeable gravitational pull, but it was like being on the surface of a moon--his body knew which way was down, and he wasn't going to drift off into space, but neither did he have enough gravity here to walk normally.

That was fine. He wasn't planning on _walking_  from anchor point to anchor point. That could easily take hours, and he didn't want to spend that much time around a monster like this.

Keith's instructions were vague, because there was no way to be sure where he'd come down or how far he'd be able to travel in the ten minutes that was all anyone was willing to risk. They wanted the probes planted somewhere they weren't likely to get knocked free during the course of the Vkullor's travels, somewhere they wouldn't get damaged if Voltron had to try to fight it again, and spread out as much as possible so that if they lost one, they didn't lose them all.

The first target, then--and the easiest to get to--was the base of the spine he'd landed on. Down between the spines was about as sheltered as you got on a Vkullor, and this spine was big enough that Keith could probably plant half his load here without planting them too close together.

There was very little light here in the middle of nowhere; the glimmer of distant stars, a few of which were close enough to give a little illumination, like a couple of very small moons. Mostly they provided illumination by contrast as the Vkullor's spines blotted them out. Keith's headlamp lit his own path down, half falling, half sliding. The slope of the spine was too steep for anything else, and gravity was low enough that Keith wasn't particularly worried about hurting himself.

Still, it was creepy descending down here, into the dark valley between spines. The slope evened out near the creature's back, but it slipped down under the next spine in line, creating a wide, dark, narrow cave. Keith stopped where they overhang of the next spine was just low enough to make him stoop, detaching the probe at the end of the chain and kneeling down to affix it to the Vkullor's skin. He had to remind himself that it was skin--or scales, or whatever--and not stone.

At the press of a button, a trio of hooks shot out of the base of the probe, piercing the scale Keith had set it on and clamping itself to the ground. Keith tested its grip, then moved on.

He headed toward the left side of this cave-like hollow to plant the next probe. He wasn't sure how flexible the Vkullor's spines were, but he didn't want to venture too far in, just in case they laid flat and crushed the probe--or him. It was a long trek to the outside edge of the spine, but a few bursts from his jets brought him there quickly enough, and he settled the second probe into a little hollow in the scale where it would be sheltered even if the spine did press flush against the Vkullor's back.

The timer on his visor's display told him he'd already used up three and a half of his allotted ten minutes, so Keith hurried onward. There was a deep cut running through the Vkullor's hide not far away, a crevice in the ground that looked like a battle scar, though Keith didn't know where this thing might have picked up a wound like that.

It made for a good resting place for the third and fourth probes, one at the narrow end closest to the spines, one toward the midpoint, where the gash was wide enough for Keith to drop down some twenty feet to a sliver of a ledge.

"Three minutes left," Matt called. His voice sounded tinny and hollow, and Keith paused, the fourth probe wedged against the wall. "How's it coming?"

Keith braced himself against the opposite wall of the crack, trying to get the probe as flush as possible. "Planting number four now." He hit the button, and the hooks sank in, and somewhere deep below him, something lit up green.

The bottom dropped out of Keith's stomach, and he froze, waiting for--he didn't know. For the Vkullor to fly into a rage, for the crevice to suddenly collapse, crushing Keith in an instant.

The moment passed, and the glow faded, and Keith fired his jets, launching himself up and out of the crevice. He overshot by a considerable margin, but once he steadied himself in the air, he took the moment to scan for somewhere to drop the last two probes. Very few of Matt and Hunk's preferred anchor points were within range, considering the short timer, but with a liberal application of jet boosts,  he could make it three or four spines up the line.

It was just going to have to do. He landed in a crouch, angled himself back toward the spines, and leaped at the same moment he fired his jets. In the low gravity, with no atmosphere to create drag, he covered quite a bit of distance in the first leap. He landed on one foot and pushed off, not letting up on his jets, and turned it into a sort of bounding, loping run at speeds that should have made his head spin.

His armor was going to need a good charge after today, but it wasn't like Keith needed to save power for anything. Get to the spine he'd picked out as his target, then get up high enough to rendezvous with Matt and Akira. As long as he could manage that, he was golden.

Keith must have covered a mile in less than two minutes, skipping over two spines and sliding into the cave underneath the next. He attached a probe as he went, hardly slowing, and sprinted as far as he dared waste the time on before reaching up and anchoring the final probe on the ceiling above him.

One of the hooks sank into what looked like a mineral vein in the stony cave ceiling, a smoother patch that glinted in the light of Keith's lamp. When the hook sank in, however, a bolt of crimson light raced down it, disappearing into the depths of the cave. A second later, waves of green raced outward underfoot, branching and scattering as they faded into the distance.

"What did you just do?" Matt asked, the interference on the comms not enough to diminish his alarm.

"I don't know." Keith turned, launching himself into the air, and slamming against the neighboring spine. "I'm coming up."

He scrambled for purchase on the spine, but didn't wait for solid footing before firing another burst from his jets to take himself higher. He feared, for a moment, that Matt wouldn't know where to find him with the Vkullor scrambling everything but their comms, but there he was, a flash of red and silver sweeping in from the dark and catching the beam of Keith's headlamp as he swung around. Keith didn't wait for the order; he leaped, firing his jets continuously to clear the row of spines, and Matt snatched him out of the air.

The wind went out of him as he hit the floor inside Red's mouth and rolled, but he picked himself up and raced to the cockpit, wheezing as he went. He could see the scene already, through Matt's eyes: the Vkullor, rippling with angry red and bursts of warning green, turning slowly from its course as though it knew they were there.

Matt didn't wait to be found. He took off, and once Keith joined him in the cockpit, their speed redoubled. Matt opened a wormhole to take them away, but it wasn't until they were safely back in the castle that Keith's heart stopped pounding.

* * *

"The time has come."

Allura stood before an assembly of Coalition leaders and their envoys, some only present in hologram form, many more physically present. More than Allura had expected, honestly, given the short notice. Her heart pounded in her throat, anticipation trembling in the air all around her. She'd told Coran not to supply any details in the message he sent out, but the people gathered here--those who ruled their worlds and those who advised their rulers--they had to have known this was something big.

Allura's platform hovered a few feet off the ground--not a dramatic display, but enough for everyone in the room to see her. There were so many. Dozens of worlds; hundreds of individuals gathered to hear her speak. Tens of thousands of ships, if she did her job and swayed them to her side.

"For too long, Zarkon has had his way with the universe. He has conquered, enslaved, slaughtered, and he has done so mostly unchecked. But no longer."

Silence filled the hall--the same hall where they'd held the first summit so long ago. Allura marveled at how far they'd come. She stepped forward, the heavy cape she'd chosen to accent her paladin armor curling around her thighs as she moved.

"Alone, we are powerless. Even Voltron, for all its power, can’t be everywhere at once. But together, we are something more. Together, we can bring Zarkon's Empire to its knees.

"The people of the Greater Chettok Galaxy fought long and hard to keep Zarkon out of their homes and out of their lives. Even now they fight. Zarkon may claim ownership of the Greater Chettok, but he has not subdued its people. All it will take is a spark to reignite the flames of rebellion. I mean to be that spark, together with all of you gathered here. We will retake the Greater Chettok, join our fleets with theirs, and continue the push deeper into Zarkon's holdings."

Her hands curled around the railing at the front of her platform, and she leaned forward, catching as many eyes as she could.

"I know fear has held us back thus far. Zarkon's might is impressive, and the weapons he wields a formidable deterrent. I promised you all that I would find a way to counter the greatest threat of all, Zarkon's Vkullor. And I have."

Somewhere behind her, Shiro cued the display screen, which brought up the live feed tracking the Vkullor's position. "The paladins and I have found a way to track the Vkullor. We know where it is, and we know that it is in no position to strike at any of your worlds in the near future. If and when it does move to attack, we will know, and we will stop it."

Murmurs eddied beneath her, delegations turning to confer with each other, screens flashing as envoys sent messages home to the ones who had sent them. Allura allowed herself a small smile as she stepped back from the railing. She let the whispers continue for a short time before she spoke again, the ring of her voice bringing an immediate hush back to the room.

"This is only a temporary solution, I know, but I pray it brings you all some peace of mind. We are not finished with the Vkullor; many of the universe's greatest engineers are gathered on my ship, the Castle of Lions, and we are working on a weapon that will end the Vkullor once and for all." She raised her arm in a sweeping gesture that encompassed the display screen behind her. "We have done the impossible before, and we will do it again. The Vkullor will fall. Zarkon's Empire _will fall._  But we need your help to make it happen. We will speak more on the details of the Chettok plan in coming days, but I implore you all to consider your place in this war, to ask yourselves what you would give to be rid of the Empire for good. That dream can be a reality. It is closer now than it has been in ten thousand years. All we need to do is seize it.

"In two weeks time, we begin our assault on the Greater Chettok. I ask you all to stand beside me and to prove, once and for all, that Zarkon is not invincible.”


	32. Sentimentality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins managed to place a series of trackers on the Vkullor, each one linked to an identical probe located outside the Vkullor's sphere of influence. With eyes on the biggest threat, the Coalition was finally spurred into action to begin the liberation of the Greater Chettok Galaxy.

Two weeks wasn't enough time to mobilize for a campaign like what they had planned for the Greater Chettok Galaxy. There were too many moving parts, too many Coalition worlds still sitting on the fence. Shiro couldn't go a day without some new minor meltdown stealing his attention, and he hardly saw Allura through it all. They traded off visits to vacillating allies, which meant one or the other of them was always away from the castle or holed up on the comms deck while the other tried to wrangle the military side of things.

Today, Shiro was on war duty, Allura off on another mini tour with planned stops at three of the last hold-outs. Akira had sent one of his pilots with her so she could grab a few minutes of rest on the ship between visits--likely the only rest she would get in the next thirty-six hours unless things went far more smoothly than they were anticipating.

Not very much seemed to be going smoothly these days.

"We're making progress," Aransha assured him in a tone that said they weren't _really_  making progress, but she didn't want to worry him by saying so. "We've just run into a few snags."

"What sort of snags?" Pidge asked. The rest of the paladins had been rotating through the conference room that had been designated the war room by virtue of being a convenient midpoint between the bridge, the comms deck, and the paladins' quarters. Those four places were where Shiro lived these days, when he wasn't taking his turn at politics.

"The machinery here is degraded, sometimes extremely so. Between the multiple cave-ins and general weathering, very few of these panels are still in working order. We'll be able to repair some of them, but others will need to be replaced--which means we've not only had to figure out how the machine works, but how to work with the Klenna metals. We _are_ figuring it out, but we haven't made as much progress on the repairs as we would have liked."

"I can have Ryner's AI work on that if you want," Pidge said. "She's been wanting more ways to help out with the war, and the kind of processing power she's got access to? Well. If you want to send anything along, I can ask her to take a look."

Aransha nodded, a touch of longing in her eyes. "I might just take you up on that offer. Ryner had a way with adaptation."

Pidge chuckled. "You know, I think she'd say the same about you."

Shiro smiled to himself, but he smothered it when Pidge turned his way. It was good to see them acting so much themself, even and especially around Ryner's AI. "All right," he said to Aransha. "Well, I guess we should let you get back to work. Do you have a ballpark for when you might have that cannon up and running?"

"Two months?" Aransha spread her arms. "I'm hoping it's faster than that, but two months is as fast as I can realistically promise--and that's assuming we don't run into any major roadblocks."

Shiro tried not to let his disappointment show. Truth be told, he'd been hopping for a smaller number. The Vkullor could reach a handful of Coalition worlds in two months. It might miss them; he _hoped_  it missed them, and that they'd have the Klenahn Cannon in their back pocket the next time they went head-to-head with the Vkullor. Didn't look like that was going to happen, though. They'd just have to figure something out.

He thanked Aransha and let her go, then glanced at Pidge. "The Migration next?" he asked.

They nodded. "I've got as much data as I can find; if it's not enough for them, we'll have to figure something else out."

Because they had so many options. Shiro tamped down on his pessimism and initiated the call to Rea, an Elder from Theros who had taken up residence on the Balmera that was the political center of the Migration. The local Elders were still a ways from formally joining the Coalition, and Theros had comparatively little sway with the Migration at large; Rea was the best compromise Shiro could find. According to Shay, she worked closely with the Migration leaders, but she also remembered what Voltron had done for her home. He hoped she would be willing to work with him on this.

"Paladin Shiro," she said, bowing her head in greeting. She seemed a little bit breathless, and there was a faint hum in the background, as though she'd stepped away from a commotion to take his call. "A pleasure to speak with you."

"And you as well, Elder Rea. I hope I haven't caught you at a bad time."

She waved off his concern. "Fret not. We liberated another of our sisters this morning, but the most urgent work is done, and there are others who can fill my place for a few moments."

"It went well, I hope? Shay and Hunk told us about the progress you've been making."

"Slow progress," Rea said, "but every Balmera we save is a step toward the future we envision for our people."

Shiro nodded, waiting a beat before he spoke again. "Actually, that's what I was calling about. The Coalition is getting ready to take our next steps in the war--I don't expect your people to fight on the front lines," he added quickly. "That's not what I'm asking. I only want to ask you to consider making a few specific Balmera the priorities for your next liberation."

Rea's brow furrowed, but she didn't stop him, so Shiro waved Pidge forward.

"Zarkon has been exploiting your people and the Balmera for thousands of years to supply the Empire with power," Pidge said, "to the point that Balmera have started dying from overwork. Crystal output has been declining steadily for at least a hundred years, and it's taken a sharp downturn in just the last year or so, since we--and _you_ \--started freeing Balmera. Overall crystal supply is down about fifteen percent since this time last year. Haggar's been trying to come up with another source of energy, but so far, she hasn't had much luck. That means that the Empire at large, especially its military fleets, are dependent upon the captive Balmera."

"We are aware of this," Rea said, her voice and her face carefully neutral. "And that these liberations weaken the Empire. But we are not doing it to hurt Zarkon. We are doing it to aid our kin."

Pidge held up their hands. "No, I know. And maybe it makes us jerks to ask you to be strategic about this, but the fact is that even though Zarkon still has about a hundred Balmera under his control, almost half the Empire's crystals come from just five of them."

"And you want us to liberate them next," Rea said.

"You can keep doing exactly what you've been doing," Pidge said. "But--yeah. If you could target these five Balmera, it wouldn't just weaken the Empire; it could cripple it."

"If these Balmera are as crucial as you say, they will surely be more heavily fortified than those we have been targeting so far."

"And when you free them, think of what an asset they'll be to the Migration. These Balmera are still strong, and densely populated. You've been caring for sick and dying Balmera so much lately, it's got to be a drain on your resources."

Shiro quieted Pidge with a gesture below the camera's frame. "The Coalition will provide whatever support you need. Troops on the ground or in the air, medicine, infiltration--say the word and I'll make sure you have it. These _will_  be more difficult battles than what you've faced so far; I understand that. We don't expect you to take this risk alone."

"I do not speak for the Migration as a whole," Rea said. Her voice was sharp, but Shiro thought he saw a spark of interest in her eyes. She saw the potential benefits of this plan--for the Migration as well as for the Coalition. "I promise nothing except to speak with the other Elders. You have information on these Balmera?"

Pidge waved a data stick before plugging it into the console. "As much as I could dig up in Imperial records. I'm sending it to you know."

Rea nodded. "I will bring it to the next assembly. We will consider your proposal, and I will let you know what we decide within the movement."

"Thank you," Shiro said. "I look forward to hearing from you."

And he prayed the other Elders were willing to take the risk. The Coalition could try to retake these Balmera if the Migration refused, but Shiro had seen enough of the Balmerans' work to know that an external assault would be tougher, more dangerous, and would likely end with more casualties--both for the Coalition and for the Balmera.

Hopefully, if nothing else, the Elders would see that.

Until Rea got back to him, Shiro would just have to continue preparing for the Chettok campaign, and hope. Stars knew there was more than enough to keep him busy. He thanked Pidge for their help, then sent them off to help Hunk and Coran, who were trying to give the Lions a little extra power for the upcoming battles. The sensors in the Guard hangar indicated that a large portion of the fleet had just returned from Elayre, where they’d been helping to clean out a minor Imperial occupation. He resisted the urge to call Akira and demand a report; Akira knew how important this was and would pass along whatever news there was as soon as he had it.

Shiro could only hope that the news was good.

* * *

There was something sickeningly pretentious about the Castle of Lions.

Keena had noticed it the last time she was here, but in a distant, distracted sort of way. She'd had too much to do to waste time worrying about the fixtures of the ship around her. Now, wedged into a dark corner of the Guard hangar and staring at the distant ceiling, with its crystals and filigree and the polished silver everywhere with tiny etchings you couldn't hardly see from the ground--

She could see where the pompous pricks back on New Altea had gotten it.

The rattle and rustle all around her told her the hangar was still packed full of Guardsmen who probably wouldn't hesitate to shoot her, so Keena settled in a little lower in her nest of tarps and sacks that had been tossed carelessly in this corner together with a few dozen crates. From the clutter, Keena suspected the Guard didn't use this area much--all the better for her. A contact on Elayre had alerted her to the Guard's visit, and Keena had arrived just in time to smuggle herself into the cargo hold of an unwatched Guard fighter during the celebrations that followed the battle. It had been an uncomfortable flight back, but it was the only way onto the castle-ship without alerting all the paladins.

She hadn't come here for a fight.

Fortunately, Keena's career as a spy had taught her patience, and her irritation at the gaudy excess of the ancient Alteans gave her something to focus on as the post-battle hubub died down and the Guard slowly dispersed to whatever duties or pleasures occupied the rest of their day.

Only once the hangar was silent and the lights dimmed did Keena risk leaving her hiding spot. She levered herself up just far enough to scan the room, ensuring she was truly alone, then skirted the edges of the space and passed out into the hallway.

Now came the difficult part: traversing the castle without being seen. Good thing she'd spent so much of her tenure here familiarizing herself with the back-passages and less used segments of the ship.

 _Slow and steady_ , she told herself. She was in no rush here. She could take her time, stay out of sight, wait for the right moment to make contact.

One hour or ten, it made no difference, just so long as no once noticed her presence until she, and her son, were long gone.

* * *

Keith never realized how exhausting planning could be. He was used to being busy; between distress calls and other paladin duties, researching the Vkullor, training, and trying to find time to eat, bathe, and maybe even breathe for a second without a deadline looming over him, his life on the castle-ship had never been what he would call laid-back.

But something about preparation for the Chettok campaign made it all feel like a stroll in the park.

Hectic energy laced the castle's halls, burning in the crystal lamps on the walls, humming in the vents. Everywhere Keith turned, there was someone running through the halls, a seething mass of people checking the castle's systems, shoring up her armor, scrambling to order in food, medicine, and other supplies to get them through an extended campaign.

He thought, perhaps, that was part of it. No one knew how long it might take to reclaim the Greater Chettok Galaxy, but conservative estimates put it at a month, with some predicting ten times that. The closest Keith had come to anything like this was the months he'd spend on the homeworld with Lance and Thace, but even there, the action had come in fits and starts, with lots of waiting and watching in between.

Chettok, from the sounds of it, was going to be weeks, if not months, of endless battles and skirmishes. What rest they got would be unpredictable and fleeting, and resupplying would be dangerous and difficult. Repairs would be frantic and, with luck, infrequent.

No one wanted a single pebble out of place when they launched that first attack.

And so they scurried about, agonized over every possible complication, worked from the time the lights came on in the morning until the castle was cold and dark and quiet for the night cycle. No one escaped the mountains of work--not Guard pilots, not mechanics, not civilians, not the handful of visiting dignitaries who stared at tablets and typed furiously even through meals.

The paladins _certainly_  didn't get to skip out on the preparations. They had their training, their strategy meetings, the negotiations with holdouts from the Coalition, with suppliers, with independent military bodies joining in the campaign.

And when they ran out of paladin duties, they just got pulled to haul boxes, run tests, verify inventory counts of supplies, and a thousand other bits of vital tedium.

It left Keith exhausted, his feet dragging as he headed back to his room after finishing up on the lower levels, helping one of Coran's staff organize the storerooms. He'd stopped by the kitchens since he'd worked straight through dinner, but he was too tired to dig out leftovers and reheat them, much less sit down long enough to have a full meal, as most of the other paladins were doing. Yesterday had been an especially late night, and it was catching up to him. So he grabbed a ration bar and gnawed on it as he trudged down to the residential floor.

His eyes were drooping by the time he reached his room, the last little stub of his ration bar wrapped up in the packaging. He was too tired to force it down, even though he knew he hadn't eaten nearly enough. At least he didn't have to worry about waking up to a growling stomach in the middle of the night, not as tired as he was.

He opened his bedroom door and stepped inside, reaching out for the light switch.

Even before the lights came on, he sensed danger. _Smelled_ it--a light, sweet scent that was nonetheless stifling. It hung like a cloud of poison in the air, curling around his throat, setting his pulse racing as his fatigue vanished in a flash.

The lights blazed to life, and there she was, lying on his bed with her arms crossed under her head, relaxed enough to doze off like she belonged here. Through the rushing in his ears and the tremor that had taken root in his chest, Keith managed to find his voice, though it came out soft and breathless.

"Keena."

* * *

"It all looks good," Akira said. "We'll have to do some rush repairs on a few of the ships, but there are no major injuries, no lingering Imperial presence in the area that will draw troops away from Chettok..."

Takashi nodded, finally letting out the breath he'd been holding on and off since Akira had called him. "That's good. Think your team can take one more call before the end of the week?"

"One?" Layeni managed to contain her scoff, but only just. "All due respect, Paladin Shirogane, but we have four days until we're scheduled to make our move. I thought the point was to keep up appearances."

Takashi pressed his lips together, but he couldn't argue. With the paladins and the castle staff wrapped up in preparations for Chettok, they weren't able to get out and confront the Empire as often as they'd like. More than that, now that they were less than a week out, they had to be careful with the Lions. Voltron could take a beating, but if any of the Lions got seriously damaged now, it would be tough to have them back in top shape for the opening salvo.

Thus it fell to the Guard to answer distress calls, challenge Imperial fleets, and generally make enough noise to keep Zarkon from realizing the Coalition was planning something big. The paladins had put in a few token appearances, but nothing more. They didn't need to, when everything the Guard was doing was about as routine as this war ever got. Now wasn't the time for a big, risky strike on some place Zarkon still had a foothold.

"I'll have a new list for you in the morning," Takashi said at length. "I'll trust your discretion on how many to take on in the next few days. Just remember than we want as many of our troops as possible in this first wave."

Akira opened his mouth to reassure his brother that, yes, he did remember the plan. That he'd in fact helped come up with it, and had volunteered the Guard to be the diversion this week.

The words died on his lips as something on the other side of the castle suddenly plucked his attention away from the conversation at hand. He frowned, the command station going out of focus as he turned his attention to the currents of Quintessence fanning out all around him.

It was a strange sensation, this intrinsic awareness of the castle and its inhabitants. A few specific inhabitants especially. He knew it came from Red, and the first few times it had happened--when one of the other Lions returned from a mission, when Coran plucked on a cord in the Red Lion's inner workings that felt like it was connected to Akira's own heart, when Matt woke from a nightmare in the dead of night--it had left Akira shaken, teetering on the edge of the Heart, glassy black stone glinting with memories that lurked just below his feet.

Even now, Red's shifting attention threatened to pull him over, and his head spun between competing impulses to chase the spark of emotion that had caught her eye and to drag himself back to the conversation he was having with his brother before Takashi got too worried.

Layeni was quick on her feet, thankfully, and she stepped in to answer in Akira's stead, filling what could have been an awkward silence. Akira's head was swimming too much to make sense of her words, but he nodded anyway, and regretted the motion as his head pounded and the room around him tilted on an angle.

"Don't worry, Takashi," Akira began--but then his conscious mind finally processed what Red had noticed, and his blood ran cold.

Takashi was frowning now, completely ignoring Akira's admonition not to worry, and Akira forced a tight smile.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm going to have to let you go. There's something I need to take care of."

He ended the call before Takashi could say anything, waved off Layeni's silent questions, and strode out of the room, a growl not entirely his own already building in his throat.

* * *

"You're not supposed to be here."

Even to his own ears, Keith's words sounded frail, anger trying to ignite in his chest but struggling to win out over the shock of seeing Keena here and the icy, light-headed feeling that accompanied it.

Keena had rolled off the bed and stood as soon as Keith spoke her name, but she hadn't moved toward him yet, and he hadn't moved from the door. His ear swiveled toward the hallway outside, but it was still early, and so far as Keith knew, no one else was on this floor yet. He considered yelling for help anyway, but he wasn't sure he could draw a deep enough breath.

"You're not supposed to _be here_ ," he repeated, hating how desperate he sounded. "Coran said you're not welcome on the castle-ship anymore."

"Did he now?" Keena smiled, folding her hands at her waist. "Well, fortunately for us all, Coran doesn't know I'm here."

"Not yet, maybe."

Keena stepped forward, and Keith retreated into the hall, glad for the larger space around him. He darted a look both ways down the corridor, wondering which direction was safer. Left from here, down past the elevator, were the rooms the paladins' families used. The Mendozas tried to keep more normal schedules, so there was a chance they'd eaten an hour or two ago instead of waiting for Lance and Val. They might have already returned to their rooms for the night.

Even if they had, could Keith risk Keena turning on them? They weren't soldiers like he was, and she would have no qualms about hurting them.

Keith's back hit the wall across from his room, and he fumbled for his comm, hiding it behind his back as Keena followed him out into the hall. "What do you want?" he demanded, latching onto the anger and letting it swell to fill him. Better that than the fear and uncertainty. "Why are you here?"

"Keithka," she whispered, the pet name curdling in his ears. "Why do you think I'm here? I'm here for _you._ "

The absurdity of her statement--of the way she said it, like he should be thrilled she'd come back for him--startled a laugh out of Keith, and even the flicker of irritation on Keena's face couldn't stifle it. "For _me?_ " he asked. "What, you think I'm going to leave with you?"

"No one knows I'm here," she said, like that somehow changed his stance. "The Guard fighters aren't being watched. If we're quick, we can be on the other side of a wormhole before anyone realizes we're gone."

Keith shook his head, his hand clenching the comm unit behind his back. He glared at Keena, but rather than humor her with a response, he simply raised the comm, flicking to Matt's channel, and depressed the button.

Keena moved as he opened his mouth, and he didn't make it through a full syllable before a slim dagger flew through the air, burrowing into the rim of metal that rose over the top of Keith's fingers. The comm was ripped from his hand, smacked against the wall, and then fell to the ground, a wisp of Quintessence rising from the crack around the blade as the screen went dark.

"Keith," Keena said, halfway between a plea and a threat. "Let's talk about this."

"What is there to talk about?" he demanded. "I'm not going anywhere with you. _This_ is my home now. The other paladins are my family."

Keena took one step forward, only halting when Keith's bayard fell into his hand in a flash of light. "I know you think you owe these people something," she said, her voice wheedling and her hands held up like she was trying to calm him. "I know you want to help. But there are better ways to do that. You're wasted here, Keith. I know you feel it."

"I _feel_  you're delusional."

Her lip twitched, and for a second he thought she was going to laugh at him. Instead, she drew another dagger, which she held loose at her side. "I'm your _mother_ , Keithka."

"We filed for dissolution," he said, the words tumbling out of him like a feeble shield. Those forms had been a formality, and he knew it. They stopped Keena from using the laws of New Altea to trap him, but she'd turned her back on New Altea when she left the castle-ship. She didn't care about the dissolution any more than she'd cared when Keith rejected her with his own words. "Karen adopted me. I'm a Holt now."

Keena's nostrils flared, her eyes narrowing to slits. "Of course she did. She's been manipulating you ever since she came to the castle."

"I think you're confusing her for you."

"She doesn't care about you, Keithka, not really." She took another step toward him, her dagger still loose at her side. She didn't look like she was going to attack, but Keith couldn't take his eyes off it. Her words made him flinch, but he shook them off. He knew the difference between Keena and Karen. He knew which of them really cared.

"You should go," Keith said, trying to make his voice as firm as possible. He didn't want to leave Keena any room to twist his words around, to deflect or to manipulate him into continuing on a discussion he didn't want to have. "Leave now and I won't have you arrested."

That was a lie. Even if she turned and walked away right now, Keith would put the whole castle on high alert if it meant capturing Keena and eliminating the threat she posed to the Coalition. But first he needed to get away from her.

Keena's lips pursed, her free hand diving into a pocket. But it was her shifting grip on her knife that caught his attention. He tensed, raised his bayard.

"I'm sorry, Keithka," she said, and lunged.

Keith activated his bayard as he brought it up, his blade clashing with Keena's--but she didn't pull back to try again, and she didn't try to twist away from his parry. She just shifted, forced his sword back and to the side, until neither of them had any leverage.

Then she brought her other hand up, a white cloth wrapped around it. A sweet, sharp scent burned his nose, but he was backed against the wall, and she'd forced his sword too far to the side for him to get it between them before she was on him, pressing the cloth to his mouth and nose.

A headache exploded inside his skull as the first whiff of the drug took effect, and he clamped his lips shut, fighting not to breathe in any more of it, but his head was already spinning, the half a ration bar he'd eaten fighting to come back up. He swallowed down the nausea, clawing at Keena's hand to try to get a breath of fresh air. His mind raced, adrenaline whiting everything out except a panicked loop of disbelief. Was Keena actually going to kidnap him? Did she think he wouldn't fight her he second he woke up? Or was she going to keep him prisoner for the rest of his life?

He knew one thing for sure: if Keena had her way, Keith would never see the Holts or any of the other paladins again.

Keith kept clawing at Keena's hand, but his strength was rapidly failing, his head whirling and his vision tunneling. His lungs burned with the need for air; his nose burned with the chemical odor trying to worm its way into his lungs. He tried to bring his other hand in to help, but Keena grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the wall. His legs shook, and his eyes watered, and he knew he wouldn't be able to hold his breath much longer.

A roar rattled inside Keith's chest, in the air around him. He gasped before he could stop himself, and black spots danced across his vision. The world tilted, and Keith's next breath tasted sour. He retched, and met no resistance when he turned, only a cold floor beneath him that chilled his feverish cheek and soothed the pounding headache.

He breathed again, coughing, his vision still fading in and out but the roar a constant inside him. He struggled to raise his head, but he couldn't make much sense of the scene before him. Two figures, one in light gray, the other in navy blue. The darker figure was on top of the other, snarling, but the other wasn't giving up the fight. Light flashed on metal, and Keith winced as his headache pulsed like a vice cinching tight around his skull.

A rhythmic patter joined the cacophony, and a sharp voice rang out.

"Commander. What's--?" The voice cut off with a hiss and a muttered curse, followed by more words, fainter words, but no less severe. They swam in the air around Keith, as indecipherable as alien tongues without a translator.

Someone else cursed--Keena, he thought, but his addled mind twisted her voice into something unfamiliar. Then there was a cry of pain, and the sharp voice from the other end of the hallway grew loud and focused once more.

"Akira!"

Keith opened his eyes once more, pushing himself up far enough to get another look at the pair fighting on the ground nearby. Keena, in her light gray flight suit, scrambled to her feet, dagger in hand and dripping crimson blood.

The figure in dark blue--Akira--lunged after her. The way he moved was strange, more fluid and bounding than usual, keeping low to the ground, springing from a crouch like a--

Like a lion.

Akira caught Keena as she started to run, and they fell, Keena twisting to slash at Akira's face with her bloodied knife. He lurched back, turning just enough for Keith to see his eyes, which blazed gold, brighter and more garish than they ever had when Red was in control. He growled, the sound more animal than human, but in flinching back from Keena's knife, he'd lost his grip on her. She wriggled free, kicking him in the teeth as she did so, and while he was reeling, she sprang to her feet and fled.

The newcomer--Layeni--gave chase, shouting into her comm. Akira started after her.

"Wait!" Keith cried, his voice hardly more than a wheeze. He tried to pull himself upright, but his head spun so viciously he had to stop halfway, gasping for air and fighting not to be sick.

In an instant, Akira was at his side, an arm around his back and the other supporting him under the elbow. With Akira's help, Keith managed to sit up, though he had to lean heavily on Akira's shoulder.

Akira's? Or Red's? They watched him with those burnished gold eyes, a pained rumble on every breath, rattling in Keith's chest. For a long moment, neither said anything. Keith, for his part, wasn't sure he could have spoken without puking, and Akira--or Red--seemed not to feel the need.

Eventually, though, the need to know overwhelmed the effects of Keena's poison, and Keith lifted his head. "Akira...?"

Akira stiffened, then blinked rapidly, each sweep of his lashes banishing a little more of the gold in his eyes until all that remained was the familiar, warm gray. He smiled, a little shakily. "Hey. You okay?"

He was now that Akira was back, not that he was going to say that. He just sagged against Akira, wrapped his arms around Akira's waist, and gave in to the shivers that wracked his body.

* * *

They didn't find Keena before she found her way to an escape pod on the upper levels, and before Layeni could scramble the Guard, someone opened a wormhole in the escape pod's path, and Keena vanished somewhere beyond the paladins' reach.

Matt was furious, anger and disgust seething just beneath his skin, and he kept pacing the common room where Akira had sequestered Keith after the attempted kidnapping. Akira refused to let Keith leave--or maybe it was more accurate to say that _Red_  refused to let Keith leave; Matt could see a brilliant magenta spark in Akira's eyes whenever the light caught them. However much he looked, acted, and sounded like Akira, Keena's intrusion had awoken Red, and Matt didn't think she would be mollified so soon.

Everyone else had piled in here, Shiro and Allura making it their base of operations while everyone else clustered about in varying states of unrest. Lance, like Matt, was pacing relentlessly and, like Matt, he never strayed more than ten feet from Keith's side, like he thought Keena might slip in among the gathered paladins to whisk Keith away.

...Matt would be lying if he said there wasn't a little corner of his mind telling him the same thing.

Coran had already examined Keith for any serious injuries, but fortunately he hadn't inhaled much of the compound on Keena's cloth--not exactly chloroform, if Matt understood Coran's explanation correctly, but functionally the same, up to and including the dangers of high exposure. Aside from a lingering headache and some nausea and vertigo that had already passed, Keith had gotten off free and clear.

Akira, not so much.

"I'm fine," he growled, slouching down lower on the couch where he sat beside Keith, hovering so close no one but Pidge had so far dared to approach. Matt had sensed some of Red's bristling protectiveness crackling in the air when they dropped down on Keith's other side and latched onto him, but it had calmed since, Red's overwhelming presence retreating back into a quieter watchfulness. There was still a touch of her in Akira's voice, but he was mostly himself, enough that no one except Shiro seemed to notice anything amiss at all.

At the moment, Shiro looked more exasperated than anything, his present concern more for Akira's physical rather than mental well-being. "You got _stabbed,_ Akira," he said, setting down the tablet on which he was monitoring the search for Keena--or any unpleasant surprises she might have left behind.

Akira's crossed arms shifted lower on his stomach, as though that could hide the dark, wet patch on his side. "She barely nicked me."

Karen sighed. She'd been pacing behind the couch, chewing on her thumbnail, but she stopped now, framing Akira's head with a hand on the back of the couch on either side. "Cryopod," she said sternly. "Now."

He tipped his head back, a dangerous glint in his eye. "Keena just tried to drug and kidnap Keith, and you expect me to take a nap because of a little scratch?"

"I'm fine, Akira," Keith said. He was still a little groggy--though Matt suspected that was more the headache and the adrenaline crash than the Galra chloroform--but he leaned on Akira's shoulder and gave a single, decisive nod. "Keena's gone, and everyone's on alert now, anyway. You can spare an hour to get patched up."

Akira still looked unhappy, but when Keith sat up straight and gave him a nudge, he grudgingly got to his feet and followed Coran to the door. He stopped there in the doorway, looking back at Keith one last time before he disappeared.

Karen waited just long enough to ensure that neither Lance nor Matt had settled down enough to sit, and then she took the seat Akira had vacated, putting her arm around Keith's shoulders and pulling him into a hug. He put up a token resistance, then curled against her, much like Pidge had curled against him.

"How did she get in?" Karen asked.

Allura shook her head. "Looks like she snuck into a Guard fighter on the mission this morning. Layeni's speaking with the pilot right now to see whether there's any chance she might have been in on it, but just looking at the tapes, I'd wager she had no idea she'd picked up a passenger."

"Don't those fighters have a car alarm or something?" Lance grumbled. "People shouldn't be able to just hop in whenever they feel like it."

"We're looking into it," Shiro said. "And Layeni's going to train her pilots to do a visual sweep of the cockpit and cargo space before takeoff."

Not that any of that changed what had already happened. Matt had felt a sudden surge of anger from Red, Akira, or both, but he hadn't found out what had happened until word reached him through the grapevine--Layeni had called someone in the Guard, who'd called someone else, who'd eventually reached out to Coran, who passed the message along to Shiro and Allura, who happened to be eating dinner with Matt.

He still hadn't stopped shaking--or wishing he'd figured it out quick enough to find Keena and skin her alive. He was sure it would be weeks before he trusted Keith to be out of his sight for more than ten minutes without wondering whether Keena had returned for a second attempt.

Unfortunately, it was late, and there wasn't much to do. Keena was gone, and Layeni cleared her pilot, and Akira returned, changed into clean clothes but scowling deeper than ever. He looked ready to chase Karen out of her seat right up until he realized Keith had fallen asleep on her shoulder--the first of them to nod off, but Hunk, Shay, and Meri looked to be close behind.

Karen eventually took pity on them all, rousing Keith enough to walk him back to his room, which was the signal the others had all been waiting for to disperse, some to find sleep, others food. Matt trailed behind his mother and Keith, together with Lance and Pidge. No doubt all of them were thinking about whether it would be too awkward to volunteer to stay with Keith tonight, or whether he'd be offended.

Lance beat the rest of them to the punch, taking Keith's hand as they reached his bedroom. They traded long looks, then Lance turned to the rest of them. "I'll call you if anything happens, okay?"

It wasn't okay, and Matt wanted to say so, to barge into Keith's room and keep a lookout all night, just in case, but Karen had already nodded, leaned in to give Keith a kiss goodnight, and she herded Matt and Pidge away while Keith and Lance headed into the darkened room.

Matt didn't sleep well that night, but Keith hadn't vanished by the time morning came around.

* * *

Time marched on. Keena had vanished into the black of space, and even though Akira wanted to hunt her down and roast her alive--a point on which he and Red were in perfect agreement--there wasn't a single trace of her to follow.

So instead, Akira threw himself into the last few missions the Guard had to do before the Chettok campaign began. Takashi reported back with good news from the Balmera Migration, who had agreed to liberate Pidge's five priority targets next, and who wanted only a small contingent of Gaurd pilots to provide air support while the Balmerans themselves carried out the ground assault. Akira selected two of his best squads to send to the Migration, and before he knew it the day had arrived.

It was time to begin the assault on the Greater Chettok Galaxy.

* * *

Shiro breathed through his tension as the Black Lion led the fleet toward the Feckloth Band, an asteroid field near the outward edge of the Greater Chettok where the Empire had set up one of half a dozen major outposts in the region. The Feckloth Base was the most exposed of them all, though perhaps the most heavily staffed. Three warships were stationed in the area, along with their support fleets and an extra contingent of fighters housed in the base itself.

The asteroid field provided moderate cover for the defenders, but it also obscured the approaching fleet. Even once the Empire knew they were here, it would be difficult to get an accurate count of the Coalition forces. Shiro was counting on that, and had advised their allies to scatter and approach from a wide arc.

The lions, of course, were all cloaked, the castle-ship hanging back to keep itself off the scanners. It was one of the few ships they had besides the _Hope of Kera_ , Anamuri's flagship from the Kera Rebellion, that was capable of attacking at such great range.

"Everyone steady on," Shiro said, as much to soothe his own nerves as anything. He let his mind diffuse outward through the bond, checking in with the other paladins. They were all nervous, of course, some more eager for the fighting to begin than others, but they kept on pace, picking off scout ships as they spotted them in among the asteroids, but otherwise lying low.

"You think they know we're coming?" Pidge asked.

"I think the Coalition's too big for there not to be a leak. Someone, somewhere is bound to have fed a general idea of our plan back to Zarkon," Lance said. "The only question is how high up the waterworks the leak is, and whether they know we're coming here, _today_ , or just that we're going to put in an appearance somewhere in this galaxy sometime fairly soon."

It was a fair assessment of the situation, so Shiro didn't bother to add anything on. They'd done their best to keep the vital information need-to-know, and the short window for preparations had been designed to limit the damage loose tongues might do, but everyone here knew there was a chance they were all marching straight into a trap.

If that were the case, it was best to spring it on their own terms.

The lions hit first, still cloaked, unloading with everything they had to soften up the defenses and set the Empire scrambling. Red, Green, and Yellow each targeted one of the warships; Shiro had instructed them to aim for the weapons first. At least two of them had an ion cannon, and the less the fleet had to worry about those, the better. Very few of their allies had anything that could stand up to a single hit from an ion cannon, and not even the asteroid field could offer enough coverage to protect the rest.

Shiro and Allura, meanwhile, went in together with Blue to hit the base itself. If there was a central command for this region, it was likely to be stationed on the base, along with the most direct line of communication back to the heart of the Empire. If they destroyed it before the people inside had a chance to call for backup, they might be able to buy themselves at least a few more minutes.

Black and Blue caught the base between them, Blue's lasers searing hole after hole into the bridge, hangars, and shield array while Black opened her mouth and released a stream of raw gravitational energy. It passed through the station's hull without damaging it, but in its path, metal crumpled, air-tight seals popped, and a column straight through the center shriveled up like a crushed soda can.

The response from the fleet was almost instantaneous. The warships returned fire in all directions, as though hoping to catch their unseen assailants by pure luck. Fighters, gunners, and heavier support ships poured out of all three warships, and a smaller trickle emerged from the mangled base.

Shiro charged and released two more gravity blasts before the fighters around him grew so thick they started tearing themselves apart on Black's shield.

Lasers chased these explosions like hounds scenting their prey, and Shiro pulled back while Allura turned her attention to the other paladins.

"Fall back," she said. "Coalition forces, start picking off these fighters. We'll handle the warships."

The other paladins were ready for the order, and as the sleek Guard fighters, patchwork rebel ships, and the fledgling fleets of two dozen worlds swarmed the Imperial forces from all sides, the paladins regrouped behind an asteroid that drifted clear of the fighting. As one, the lions dropped their cloaks, and Shiro hardly had to tug on the bond before they all fell into the Voltron formation.

Moments later, they charged back into the fray, twelve minds united as one. Akira still shied away from the bond, more present than a lion but less integrated than a paladin, but he breathed, and he quieted, and Red rose up to patch over the rough spot in the bond that was an adjunct's mind.

(That might have been more distracting than Akira himself, not least of all for the way it made Shiro tense up, his thoughts chasing after his brother for a fleeting moment before Akira reached out with a smile, like squeezing Shiro's outstretched hand in reassurance.)

They refocused, pushed down their fears, turned their minds back toward the battle at hand. And it was a battle now, as big as any they'd faced in recent months. The Coalition fleet was bigger than ever, with ships from nearly every ally Voltron had made over the course of the last year and a half. The Coalition had appointed a joint command over the bulk of the forces, and even those who remained more or less independent--the Voltron Guard, Anamuri's rebel fleet, the private guard of a handful of royal houses, and the contingent of Galra troops who had come from the homeworld to help--even these deferred to the Coalition command for tactical assignments and general orders.

Most of the time they did.

It was the first time all these disparate forces had fought together, and it showed. Communication was slow at best, and many of the smaller independent fleets surged ahead on their own, choosing their own targets and hunting them down, even if it meant leaving an ally's flank undefended.

Lance bristled at the sight, as did Shiro, while Allura only closed her eyes and prayed they'd all get the chance to improve upon these weaknesses in the next battle.

For now, the paladins couldn't waste the time or the breath on trying to bring their army back in line. Three warships loomed ahead of them, rocked now and again by blasts from the Castle of Lions and the _Hope of Kera_. Their ion cannons were mangled and dark, but they had plenty more firepower scattered across their hulls, enough to decimate the Coalition fleet, and shields strong enough to hold up against a prolonged assault.

Not so much a prolonged assault from Voltron.

They buried their sword in the first ship's power core, smiling as darkness washed across the hull and both weapons and shields flickered out.

The other two warships turned away from the fighters and custom ships of the Coalition fleet, focusing all their firepower instead on Voltron. Pidge and Val snapped the shield up, and the paladins pushed through the onslaught, carving through the second warship as easily as the first.

By now, the crew of the last remaining warship had seen just how outmatched they were. The engines flared, and the ship lurched away--though how they thought they could outrun Voltron was anyone's guess. A portion of the Imperial fleet turned back, hounding Voltron like so many mosquitoes swarming around their head, but none of them could stop the last warship from meeting the same fate as the other two.

With the final warship dead in the air, Voltron turned its attention to the ships buzzing around it, swatting them down, blasting a wide swatch of the fleet with Yellow's shoulder-mounted missile launchers. Once they had room to maneuver again, they returned to each warship and the base in turn, making sure there was nothing left that could pose a threat.

There wasn't time to celebrate, though. Just a few moments after the last warship fell, half a dozen wormholes burst alight in the night sky, blazing like full moons all around the asteroid field. More ships came pouring out of each of them--dozens more, as many as Zarkon had sent to New Altea, or to the Battle for Kera so long ago.

Too many for Voltron to face them all.

Lucky for the paladins, they had a new trick this time around.

One by one, they all took up the bond, holding it in their minds, focusing on those connections as they released the Voltron formation. Five lions burst apart a moment later, each taking off for a different wormhole, each filled with an expectant hush as the Voltron bond resounded as clear as ever, carrying strength, speed, and insight along the interconnected web of minds.

There was no time for conversations as the Voltron Lions plunged back into the fray.

* * *

Karen's heart pounded as the shuttle glided through open space.

She told herself there was no reason to be worried. There were no enemies in sight, nothing on the scanners to indicate they were flying into danger. (She assumed there was nothing on the scanners; she still wasn't the best at reading those things, and she was wound too tight right now to have focused on any of it anyway. Surely Thace would have given an indicator, if nothing else.)

But of course, Karen wasn't worried about getting into trouble herself. Her children were somewhere behind her, fighting what might well turn into the biggest battle they'd yet faced. An established Imperial base squarely within Imperial territory, with backup a call away, if not already waiting to strike.

At least it hadn't been an ambush. No one had called to say so--no one _would_ call to say so, and risk betraying the _Almys'_ mission before it had even begun. Only a small handful of people knew what was happening here. The paladins and their adjuncts, of course. Kolivan. Most of the Coalition leaders knew only the fact of the matter: that the paladins had sent an envoy ahead to try to make contact with whatever resistance, organized or otherwise, still survived out here in the Greater Chettok. Who had been sent, how many, where they were going and when--that information was closely guarded to keep the crew as safe as possible. The _Almys_ , like all Guard ships, had sturdy shields and basic weapons, and Tosk and Evri, the Guard pilots who had been chosen to accompany Karen and Thace, were trained for combat.

Four people, one of them not even a soldier, still couldn't stand up to any show of force from the Empire. Their mission depended on secrecy. That meant a small crew, hand-picked; no comms chatter; no unnecessary stops; and no wormholes.

It also meant Karen had never been more grateful for the preternatural knowledge granted her by the adjunct bond. That bond was the only way she had to know her children were still alive for however many days or weeks it took to make contact with the resistance.

Alive, but in danger. The battle at the Feckloth Band had only just begun, the first wave of reinforcements having just arrived on the scene. There would be more, Karen knew. How many depended on how badly Zarkon wanted to hold his forward base--or, more likely, how long it took him to realize he couldn't.

It had been a long time, Karen suspected, since anyone had posed any real threat to Zarkon's iron grip on the universe. Even Voltron, as powerful as it was, could only be in one place at once. For nearly two years now, they'd taken what they could get, dug in their heels, and refused to lose ground.

Today, they would do more than simply hold on.

Today, and in the days to come, they would reclaim the Greater Chettok Galaxy--and it would mark the beginning of the end for the Galra Empire.

* * *

Fury thrummed in Keena's veins.

Fury at the paladins, so insular and distrusting. Fury at Karen, a skilled manipulator who had turned even the most reasonable of them against Keena. Fury at Keith, for letting himself be taken in, to the point that he repeatedly and adamantly rejected Keena's offers of peace.

Most of all, though, she was furious with herself. She was a Spymaster, whether or not the idiots on New Altea wanted to accept it. She was shrewd, calculating, unstoppable. She made the right decision--the _smart_  decision--every time. She didn't let sentimentality lose her the battle, much less the war.

Or she hadn't, until her son entered the picture.

The frosty swirl of a wormhole closed in around her ship--not the escape pod in which she'd fled the Castle of Lions, and not the speedy but indefensible one-man cruiser she'd been using on her frequent jaunts to shore up her fledgling alliance. She'd acquired this one from one of her wealthier sponsors, a shuttle with sturdy shields and an advanced navigation system.

It was one of the few things that could bring her to the heart of the Empire in one piece.

Perhaps the worst part of all this was that the situation with Keith had Keena lying to herself, something she wasn't in the habit of doing. She'd told herself that Keith was key to her strategy--and perhaps at one point, he was. A well-known and generally well-liked figurehead of the anti-Empire movement, Keith made for some powerful perception shifting, and his time on the homeworld could have, _should have_ , set him up as a powerful counterpoint to Princess Allura and her Coalition.

The truth was, that plan had crumbled the moment Keith cast off responsibility for the independent Galra of the homeworld. In leaving them to govern themselves, he'd removed them from the stage of rebellion politics and relegated himself to a supporting role.

And Keena had moved on. She didn't need Keith for any of her new plans. Her allies and sponsors certainly didn't care whether or not he was on board with any of it.

She didn't _need_  him at her side.

She just _wanted_  him there, and she'd risked everything to bring him home.

Well, he wasn't coming home. Not now, and likely not ever. Karen Holt had seen to that, and Keena had finally been forced to accept it.

She had to move forward. Make the right choice, the smart choice, and not the sentimental one.

Zarkon's flagship loomed large before her as the wormhole fell away, and a familiar thrill of anticipation flooded Keena's system. It had been a long time since she'd set foot on an Imperial cruiser, even longer since she'd played their games of posturing and intimidation, but she hadn't forgotten the rules.

The fleet noticed her arrival at once, of course. She'd opened a wormhole inside their perimeter and come in uncloaked, on a ship that didn't so much as attempt to mimic Imperial clearance codes. The first wave of fighters hit her with a salvo of lasers that rocked her small shuttle, but her shields held, as she'd known they would.

"Hold your fire, you imbeciles," Keena barked on an open channel, leveraging every ounce of command she'd acquired as an officer in Zarkon's army. "I'm not here to fight, I'm here to see Emperor Zarkon."

A guffaw answered her, and a face appeared on her comms screen. Gruff, surly, and graying, but only mid rank. This man either lacked the ambition to reach a higher station, or he lacked the power to hold it. Either way, he was no threat. "Right, and I'm on my way to rendezvous with the rebel princess."

"Did I give you permission to speak?" Keena snapped. "Stow the wit and escort me to the hangar or I'll hand you over to the witch to do as she pleases."

The man flinched at that, catching himself a moment later and scowling, as though wondering who Keena was to threaten him like that. By this point, of course, Keena had already continued on, setting a course for the first hangar she saw. Perhaps it was the one she wanted, perhaps not, but any hesitation here would be the end of her.

She just had to make it onto that ship, and she was set. On foot, she could kill anyone who tried to stop her. In the air, she was only as strong as her ship, and this ship couldn't take much more than that first barrage.

(She'd never claimed her plan was a safe one, but it _was_  her only chance. The paladins had somehow managed to track the Vkullor, and now they were about to retake the Greater Chettok. If she waited any longer before cementing herself in the upper echelons of the Empire, she would lose what little support she had. She might die here today, but she would not sit around and wait to become irrelevant.)

No one else made a move to shoot her out of the sky, fortunately, and Keena settled her shuttle on the hangar floor in a spot that had just been vacated by a squadron of fighters who were most likely coming to confront her themselves.

Guards were waiting for her in the hall, but since they were more likely to escort her to a Questioner's chamber than to Zarkon himself, Keena ignored them. One reached out for her, and she drew the dagger she had tucked up one sleeve, slitting the man's throat without breaking stride.

The rest of them she dealt with just as efficiently, though she did trade the dagger for a pistol, as there were a dozen of them, and they were all going for guns of their own. They fell in a heap behind her, and cries of alarm chased her from the hangar. The graying old squad captain she'd chatted with in the sky was among them, but Keena paid him no more mind than any of the rest.

She marched through the halls, never slowing, never dropping her guard. She'd never been on this ship before, much less in Zarkon's throne room, but she knew the Empire well enough to guess the general flow of its structure, and she made her way deeper and deeper, trusting that sooner or later she would find her way to the more important areas.

Careful planning and preparation may be a spy's greatest tools, but improvisation wasn't far behind.

As she walked, she rehearsed again what she was going to say. She wouldn't have long to catch Zarkon's attention before he killed her, either for the intrusion itself or because he remembered her betrayal. Someone here had to, though if Keena were a betting woman, she would have placed it all on Haggar knowing exactly what she'd done while Zarkon hadn't the slightest idea who she was. She'd been well known in her circles, but she'd been careful not to draw too much attention from the top and, after all, she'd never openly betrayed anything.

More guards came to accost her as she honed in on the throne room, but Keena cut them all down, trailing bodies like bloody footprints marking her progress toward her goal. All the while, she fingered the data chip in her pocket. She was counting on it to buy her life--for at least long enough to set her hooks.

Zarkon was ready for her when she burst in through the throne room doors. He sat on his throne, the black bayard glowing in his grasp--glowing, shifting, but not yet settled on a form. Perhaps he was already curious as to her reason for visiting. If so, this would be even easier than Keena had anticipated.

One look at Haggar, looming in the shadows behind the throne, lightning crackling between her fingers, and at the dozen guards arrayed between Keena and the Emperor, said Keena shouldn't take anything for granted.

"I see my reputation proceeds me," Keena called, flashing a grin and spreading her arms to show that she wasn't armed--for now.

"Keena ve Lokth," Zarkon said with all the inflection of a man who had no idea who he was talking to. Haggar must have fed him the information during Keena's approach. "Imperial records say you died more than a decade ago."

"Imperial records are not infallible, Your Grace." Keena dipped into a shallow bow, treading the line between mocking and merely cautious. She _was_  surrounded by armed guards, after all. "Though I'm sure you already knew that.

"It's true," she went on, slipping the data chip from her pocket and holding it in the palm of her hand. "I faked my death all those years ago, and I returned to the ones I'd been serving as a spy for my entire adult life. It seemed like the natural progression for my career. Lieutenant on my husband's ship to Spymaster of the largest intelligence network to ever infiltrate your ranks."

She tossed the data chip over the guards' heads, and Zarkon caught it on instinct, tensing like he expected it to explode in his face. When it didn't, he uncurled his fingers and frowned at the chip.

"What is this?"

"Names," Keena said. "Every name of every spy in your ranks--or at least, all the ones I can remember now that I've lost access to my own systems."

Zarkon's head snapped up, his eyes narrowing. He studied her, as did Haggar, the both of them searching for the trap. They wouldn't find one, though. Not yet, and not until Keena was too secure in her position for it to make a difference.

"You're betraying them?" Haggar asked, the question far more restrained than the suspicion blazing in her gaze. "Your life's work, what you traded your post in the Empire for."

Keena snorted. "Betraying _them_? No. They betrayed me. I could have won them the war, but they didn't want the sort of help I had to offer. So, I'm coming to you. Offering you the same. You see, I don't care who I work for, just as long as it's the winning side." She took a step back, holding up her hands. "But of course, you wouldn't trust that easily. I understand." She nodded to the data chip in Zarkon's hand, even as she slowly drew her dagger and pistol, holding them between two fingers and then tossing them aside. "By all means, verify that what I've told you is the truth. Find the agents I've named in those files. Interrogate them--they may well be able to fill in the gaps in my memories. And once you've assured yourselves that I can be of use, we'll speak again."

"Why shouldn't I kill you now and be done with it?" Zarkon demanded, his fingers curling over the data chip.

Keena smiled, letting the guards move in to restrain her. "Because," she said. "I'm the one who's going to hand you the key to destroying Voltron, once and for all."


	33. Alayun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The battle for the Greater Chettok Galaxy has begun. The paladins are leading the charge, while Karen, Thace, and two Guard pilots venture deeper into the Greater Chettok in an attempt to make contact with the resistance. In order to stay under the Empire's radar, they can't risk wormholes or communication with the castle-ship. Meanwhile, Keena has given up on swaying Keith to her side and is proceeding with her own plot.: going to the heart of the Empire and inserting herself into Zarkon's inner circle by giving up the names of every agent the Accords has embedded in the Empire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Off-screen deaths of multiple agents of the Accords referenced in the first scene. Minor character death (off-screen) mentioned at the very end of the chapter. (No graphic details included in either discussion.)
> 
> Talk of death and loss in a general sense and a minor existential crisis in Coran's POV scene. To skip, stop reading at, "Look, I really don't have time for this right now, okay?" and jump to the next scene break. Summary of the remainder of the scene can be found in the notes at the end of the chapter.

"What do you mean you've lost contact with them?"

Allura's heart was pounding, her stomach turning over as Kolivan's grim expression turned sad. "Exactly as I've said. Seventeen agents missed scheduled check-ins over the course of the last week. After the third, we began reaching out, requesting a status report from all field agents and warning that some of them may have been compromised."

Folding her hands at her waist to disguise their tremor, Allura lifted her chin. "And you haven't heard back from any of them?"

"Fewer than ten percent." For the first time since the call began, Kolivan's composure wavered. He closed his eyes, and that more than anything made the reality of the situation sink in. Ten days into the Chettok campaign, and the Empire had dealt them a crippling blow all the more devastating because it came from the one angle none of them had considered vulnerable.

Around her, Coran and his crew shifted. A few murmurs started up, but were quickly silenced. Allura waited them out, as she waited for Kolivan to gather himself, which he did quickly. Those were his agents who had been discovered. Some may have been friends, comrades he'd fought alongside in the army.

He blamed himself. Allura knew this because she would have felt the same.

"We've recalled everyone we could," Kolivan said. "Even if they haven't been compromised yet, the Empire's Questioners might yet extract their names from the ones they've taken. A small handful of agents chose to remain in place despite the danger, so we haven't lost all eyes inside the Empire, but our information network will never be what it was."

Allura cursed. She would need to break this news to the team soon, and the Coalition shortly after. She didn't know how to do either. A selfish part of her wished Shiro were here instead, but they'd all been run ragged lately by an endless string of battles. Shiro needed rest, and Allura herself had chased him off the bridge.

Another thought occurred to her, even more horrible than everything she'd heard so far. "The Questioners--"

"They excel at their work," Kolivan said, as though he knew the direction of her thoughts. "Our agents are trained to resist their methods, but torture is the least of their tools. They can get inside a man's mind and dig up his deepest secrets. We have to consider all information pertaining to projects involving the Accords compromised, and prepare ourselves accordingly."

All projects.

Allura dropped into the seat behind her, breath going stale in her lungs.

"Oh, no," she breathed, catching Coran's eye from across the room. "Karen's team."

* * *

Karen had never truly appreciated how massive space was.

She thought she had, after coordinating with dozens of worlds on behalf of the Coalition and watching her children dash to all ends of the universe in an effort to help those suffering under Zarkon's rule. She knew how much was out there, how many people with all their varied cultures. She knew the battlefield was too vast for the paladins to defend alone.

But she'd never spared any thought for the space _between_  worlds. She'd never had to, when a wormhole could take her almost anywhere she wanted to be. The closest she'd come to recognizing the vastness of space was the three-day journey from the edge of New Altea's defensive zone to the planet itself.

They'd been flying for _two weeks_  now, just her and Thace and Tosk and Evri alone in a small shuttle with nothing but blackness all around.

The information they'd received from the Accords on the Greater Chettok Galaxy gave them a few leads on the rebellion still festering beneath the blanket of Imperial rule. They'd set a course for the closest promising planet, but they didn't dare open a wormhole this deep into Imperial airspace. Wormholes could be tracked--and in Chettok, they likely _were_. So even in the fastest ship the Castle of Lions had to offer, it was slow going.

At least it was nearly over.

"Is that it?" Karen asked, leaning over the back of Evri's seat and nodding to the planet visible as a smudge of red-orange in the distance.

Evri nodded, a clicking sound in the back of her throat the only indication she gave that she was as anxious to arrive as Karen. "We should scout the area before we land, but that's it. Alayun."

Karen's grip on Evri's seat-back tightened. This wasn't the end of their mission, not by a long shot, but it was progress. Once they landed, assuming their information was correct, and there was a rebel presence here--assuming they could _find_  said rebel presence--they might actually be able to take some strides.

It would be nice, if nothing else, to stand in open air without feeling as though she had to duck her head and hunch her shoulders. She didn't know how Sam had done this--lived and worked in close quarters for months on end, with only a handful of people around him and infrequent calls home to watch his kids growing up.

Karen could hardly stand to be away from Matt, Pidge, and Keith for two weeks. Though, admittedly, she had the added stress of knowing they were fighting a war without her.

The other Guardsman, Tosk, started the scans at once. He was a Nkorian, a burly four-armed species more than twice as tall as Evri, a Reshan like Pidge’s friend Jeya. His shoulders brushed the walls wherever he went in this tiny shuttle, and he had to turn sideways to navigate the narrow corridors in the back where they had their bunks. If Karen was getting cabin fever, she had to imagine it was even worse for Tosk, however much time he'd spent in ships built to capitalize on every inch of space.

"We'll give ourselves three days here," Thace said. "Alayun is a populous planet, with enough offworld trade to obscure our arrival. As long as we aren't caught on the approach, we should be able to enter the city quietly and search around a bit before the Empire catches on. But that doesn't mean we'll want to dawdle. Does everyone remember the information we have?"

"The agent who reported to us suspects a resistance base in the area primarily because there are signs of sabotage on Imperial ships known to have stopped at the port in the capital city of Aya," Tosk said at once. He sounded as though he were reciting the words from memory, and the motion of his four hands never slowed as he scanned this region of space for signs of any threats. "Workers at the port may be involved in the actual sabotage, or at least are giving resistance members access to the hangars."

"There's also signs of organized dissent in the city itself," Evri added. "More so in Aya than other places on the planet. The degree of difference suggests that it's more than a cultural shift. You don't see anything like it even in other major cities with spaceports. Most likely there's an organized resistance presence in Aya that's spearheading the pushback."

Karen nodded along. "Unfortunately, the Accords haven't been able to get eyes on the ground here, much less make contact with the resistance. That means the port is the only concrete lead we have."

"That it is," Thace said. He was quiet for a moment, then clapped his hand on Tosk's shoulder. "Let me know if you spot anything, or when you're ready to move in."

He hardly waited for Tosk's nod before he turned and left the cockpit, headed for the back of the ship. Karen frowned and followed him to the common area and work room where they'd spent most of the last two weeks. It was the largest room on the ship, with room to pace and room to lounge. Thace and Karen had set up one corner of the room as their work station, planning their voyage into Chettok--debating where to go next if they found nothing on Alayun, compiling every scrap of information they had on the local resistance. There wasn't much, but Thace bent over it now, swiping through their notes with a furrow in his brow.

"Something wrong?" Karen asked.

Thace shook his head. "Just a gut feeling. I'm hoping it's nothing."

Karen snorted. "Since when have you ever been okay with hoping for the best?"

"Never." Thace's lips twitched toward a smile, but the expression didn't last long. "Be prepared for anything down there, all right?"

Karen nodded slowly, studying Thace. Tension had gathered in his shoulders, and his eyes burned bright as he narrowed them at the display on the wall where they'd summarized their endless hours of planning and debate. "You think there's going to be trouble."

For a moment, she thought he wouldn't answer, but then he sighed, his shoulders slumping. "It may just be paranoia, a leftover of my time as a spy. But I’ve learned that our agents are never the first to discover something. Just because we haven’t found evidence that the Empire is moving to root out the rebellion in this area doesn’t mean they aren’t aware it exists."

“Okay… So what do we do?”

“Nothing,” Thace said. “We still have our mission. Just be prepared for it to go wrong.”

* * *

The battles never stopped.

Two weeks since they'd first launched the Chettok campaign, and hardly a day had passed without a fresh wave of Imperial ships swooping in to try to catch them unawares. The Guard had set up round-the-clock patrols; they'd activated the handful of prototype portable exclusionary zone generators they'd brought along.

It bought them an hour or two warning before each attack, and that was keeping them alive, but they were all wearing thin.

Shiro could feel it the second he stepped into Black's cockpit, Allura at his side. She was still groggy, having been roused from a dead sleep when the call came, but she shook herself awake, drawing on the simmering anger that fueled them all these days. Many of the other paladins were in the same state as Allura. They were stealing rest whenever they could, and the only ones who were already awake were the ones who, like Shiro, had been roused by a gnawing hunger.

It was hard to keep track of the mundanities of everyday life when you were fighting an enemy with nearly unlimited forces and a spite that knew no bounds.

Black was the third lion in the sky, behind Yellow and Blue. The Yellows' benefited from their adjunct bond, and were holding stronger than most of the rest of them, but after two weeks, even they were approaching their limits. Green and Red dragged themselves out of their hangars a moment later, their pilots little more than static on the airwaves of the paladin bond. Shiro tried to share his clarity with them, but it was a losing battle. The fleet that had swarmed them yesterday had been tenacious. It couldn't do much damage, but it had taken hours to hunt down every last ship, and they'd only wrapped it up about three hours ago.

The waves were coming faster now. It had been almost two full days after the strike on the Feckloth Band before the next battle, and they'd had eighteen hours after that before the next.

If Zarkon kept this up, they were going to have to rotate the paladins out of battle, as they were already rotating through the rest of their forces. It would be risky, risky enough that Shiro had held off on proposing it for nearly two weeks now--probably longer than he should have, but he and Allura both saw the truth: Voltron was the Coalition's only real tank—plus, no one wanted to miss a battle. The Empire had cut their legs out from under them in burning the Accords, and fighting was the one way they all had to stay in control.

With the Lions out front to draw the heavy fire or Voltron itself to quickly take down the big threats, the rest of their forces were able to withstand assaults that might have crushed them under different circumstances. They'd lost ten percent of their fleet in the last two weeks, but that number could have been far, far higher.

But Shiro's team couldn't keep going like this forever.

Shiro had barely a second to react to a sudden blur of black and magenta before Zarkon's Black Lion slammed into them, the impact throwing Shiro against his flight harness and knocking Allura off her feet with a shocked cry.

In the bond, every mind suddenly snapped to attention, adrenaline chasing the fatigue away as Lance shouted orders to the others. The Blue Lion tackled Zarkon's lion, dragging her off Black, but specks of red, blue, green, and yellow warned that the rest of Dark Voltron was here as well.

A fount of rage and a deep, aching sorrow sank hooks into Shiro's heart: Akira and Red, tangled up together and railing against Dark Red. The two lions were already going at it, and Shiro had to call twice, adding a mental tug via the paladin bond, before he drew them away from the fight.

They fell into formation without a word, fatigue clouding the corners of their collective mind as they formed Voltron for the second time that day. But when the transformation was complete and their vision cleared, a dozen minds falling into familiar rhythms, they found themselves facing empty space.

Zarkon's lions had scattered, Dark Red and Dark Green sprinting off to opposite ends of a battlefield that spanned half a solar system, the rest fanning out in between. They seemed content to ignore Voltron altogether, targeting instead the other Coalition ships, very few of whom could stand up to a Voltron Lion, artificial or otherwise.

"Is that how he wants to play it?" Shiro growled, the fury of the entire team tightening his grip on the controls. "Fine. Let's show him what we can do."

There was an unspoken understanding, as they broke apart, the Voltron bond holding strong once more, that they would exert only enough pressure to put Zarkon on the defensive. They hadn't shied away from using Voltron's new Lion Form in the past weeks' battles, but they'd done so, in part, because they knew the people they faced didn't know how Voltron worked or what it was capable of. They wouldn't know that the lions were more powerful than they should have been, and hopefully the reports that filtered back to Zarkon wouldn't provide enough details for him to guess it for himself.

Today wasn't a day to hold back, but Shiro didn't think for a moment that Zarkon was ready to put it all on the line, either. If it looked like he was losing, he would pull out--so the less of their true power the paladins showed, the better off they'd be when they fought Zarkon in earnest.

In the heat of battle, it was a fine line to walk, but Black kept Zarkon busy enough that he couldn't spare much thought for the other lions, who flew circles around their counterparts thanks to the boost the Voltron formation gave them. If they'd been aiming for a killing blow, they might have ended it here.

But the heart of a battle on a scale like this was no place to mount a rescue for the pilots of Dark Voltron.

Shiro and Allura matched Zarkon pace for pace, hemming him in, blocking every move he made to go after the more vulnerable ships--but only just. His rage thickened between them, something tangible in the air, a bitter taste Shiro almost managed to convince himself he was imagining.

Val plunged into the Heart, connecting with Black and pulling her to Zarkon's cockpit as she had the last time they crossed blades. Zarkon didn't panic this time, but his rage turned sour with fear, and his attacks grew more desperate, even when Val released Black to allow her paladins the sharper focus they needed to keep pace with Zarkon. They danced, wholly focused on each other, as the other paladins darted attacks at Zarkon's fleet in between passes at his lions.

They chipped away at the forces, one corner of Shiro's mind watching the enemy fleet dwindle. By the time Zarkon saw what was happening, it was too late to salvage. He called a retreat, and their allies gave a hearty cheer that rattled the comms.

Shiro was too tired to join in, but he watched the backs of the retreating fleet until a wormhole closed behind them and silence descended on the system once more.

* * *

It would be easy to get lost in the Aya City Spaceport; that much was plain from the first glance. It was practically a city unto itself, dozens of domed landing fields sprawling across the southern section of the city and out into the crimson plains beyond. From the air it looked almost like a honeycomb. Some domes were open to admit incoming traffic coordinated by a massive hexagonal tower in the center of the activity.

Even after locating the Imperial satellites and patrols in the sky, Tosk had spent a solid hour on the comms, listening to exchange after exchange before he would let Evri attempt a landing. The Accords evidently maintained a handful of merchant IDs and other documentation that made travel within the Empire easier, and Kolivan had provided them with all the relevant credentials.

With Thace as the registered owner of the vessel--under a false name, of course--it should be even easier. The Empire was far more trusting of Galra than members of the populations they held under their thumbs, for reasons no one needed to spell out. That, along with Thace's long experience going undetected and sniffing out secrets, was part of the reason he'd been chosen for this task despite the fact that the rebels weren't likely to take well to a Galra stranger.

That was for Karen to smooth out, along with Tosk and Evri--both originally rebel fighters themselves under Anamuri's command.

Karen's heart was hammering through the entire approach, as Tosk answered questions and provided credentials as effortlessly as though they were approaching an allied world with an unusual amount of red tape. She lurked in the background as Thace took the lead on the inspection once they landed--standard procedure, everyone assured her, and over in less than five minutes, but terrifying while it lasted.

It was as close as she'd ever been to an Imperial official, and even if the man wasn't military--though she doubted than anything of import in the Empire was entirely un-military--he still carried a sword and a gun and was followed by two guards who made no effort to hide the fact that they were there to kill any spies, traitors, or rebel agents they might find.

Thace, Tosk, and Evri, of course, hardly batted an eye, and as soon as the inspection was over, they were in hunt mode once more, scouring the port for signs of rebel activity as they followed the stream of traffic toward the network of roads that linked the numerous domes. Karen trailed along behind them, acutely aware of the pistol nestled in the small of her back--something they'd stowed for the inspection along with the rest of the weapons, but had donned again before they headed out.

She remembered Thace's warning that there might be trouble and hoped again the time she'd put in on the training deck would be enough, if worse came to worse and she found herself in a firefight. She wasn't wearing armor like what her kids wore into battle, but they'd all been fitted with a specialized flight suit for this mission. The suit was far thinner and more flexible than the bulky things the Garrison used, and they were armored to boot. It wouldn't help much against crushing blows or bladed weapons, but it would absorb blasts from energy weapons like pistols.

Thace seemed certain it would be enough, and what did Karen know about combat, really?

"They'll have a dedicated hangar for Imperial ships," Thace said in a low voice as they walked. "Heightened security. Restricted access. But centrally located. They wouldn't want to have to walk far to get to the city."

They found the hangar they wanted directly across from the exit. Larger than any of the other domes they'd passed, this one was emblazoned with the Imperial crest and had a pair of guards stationed at every door. Karen didn't know why she was surprised at the audacity of it. The Empire owned most of the known universe, and for thousands of years they'd faced no real threats. Why shouldn't they flaunt their presence?

Karen suspected it would be difficult to get inside, but Thace didn't seem concerned about that. The real challenge, he explained, would be to go unnoticed in a restricted area, and to catch the saboteurs in the act. They couldn't loiter around in the open, though, hoping to cross paths with their target before they got themselves thrown out.

Thace had come into this mission prepared, however. He parted ways with them at the gate, telling them to wait for him outside, and circled around the far side of the dome.

A few minutes later he joined them, and they found seats at an outdoor cafe across from the port, where they had a good view of the crowd streaming through the gates.

"Camera?" Karen guessed after they'd ordered drinks. Karen suspected they were going to be here for a while, and she didn't want to make the cafe's owners angry.

Thace nodded, pulling out a portable display, where the feed from the camera was already playing. He'd shown her the cameras--tiny things, nearly invisible and able to cling to almost any surface. "The ones we want will be leaving through the workers' door. Either they work in that dome or they're pretending to."

"Sure, but how often do they pass through?"

"As often as they have a target, I'd guess. Fortunately for us, they seem to primarily target military vessels--"

"And with war on the borders, the Empire's probably massing their troops anywhere they have the space," Evri finished. "Including here."

"Especially here," Thace said. "Alayun is a prosperous world, even now, with a thriving trade. They can send out scouts from here while they resupply, and be ready to move to intercept our fleet at any moment."

"Okay," Karen said. "So let's assume the person or people we're after _are_  here today, or will be at some point. How do we know who they are?"

Thace tried to explain it to her--and he had plenty of time to do so, as they settled into their cafe table for a good few hours, ordering food eventually to appease the wait staff. Thace listed off a hundred different things that might tip them off to a person of interest, from how their uniform fit to where they looked as they left the hangar, to the speed at which they walked and how many people walked with them.

Even when Karen attempted to apply his rules, however, she apparently kept missing the point. Everyone who appeared on the camera's feed looked suspicious to her, and no one did. They all just looked like _people_ , frankly. Scaled, feathered, many-eyed, and in some cases, limbless. But people nonetheless.

Thace sat up straighter when the shifts changed and a flood of people left the hangar all at once, and for a moment Karen thought they might actually get lucky.

They didn't, and Thace ordered another tea as he settled back in.

Tosk and Evri left, eventually, to try to get hold of workers’ schedules or manifests for the Imperial hangar. Karen didn't have the first clue how they were supposed to do that, but they didn't seem fazed by Thace's order, and not for the first time, Karen felt impossibly out of place here. She wasn't a solider, or a spy. She had no experience dealing with the Empire, much less sneaking around, breaking in places, stealing information.

She told herself that she was here for the negotiations that would come later. As one of the few politically-minded people outside the paladins themselves, who were needed to lead the charge on the front lines, Karen had been the obvious choice--or so Shiro told her with a smile like he had no doubts she would pull her weight.

First she had to survive long enough to _reach_  the politics.

The sun dropped low in the sky, the cafe grew more crowded, then emptied once more, and the staff began cleaning up for the night. Tosk and Evri returned, partially successful. They hadn't been able to access employee files, but they'd found a list of ships currently parked in the Imperial hangar and ones scheduled to arrive in the coming days.

"How's it looking?" Karen asked.

"A few promising targets, but most of them have been here for several days. Our friends may have already hit them all. There's another one set to arrive tomorrow, though. Military. Looks like a new experimental gunner."

"So, what?"

"We come back tomorrow," Thace said.

* * *

Lance was tired, the kind of bone-deep exhaustion he'd run up against only a handful of times in his life, all of them in the last year and a half. He should have been sleeping, stealing this rare break between battles to try to rest, but there was too much to do.

He'd settled into the rec room, Keith curled up on the couch beside him with his head in Lance's lap while Lance skimmed through reports from the Coalition leaders. Supply reports, counts of casualties, status reports on repairs, proposed next steps, and more. None of them had ever engaged in a campaign of this scale before except maybe Coran, and everyone was finding it more difficult than they'd anticipated.

They had to be cautious, of course. They were the clear underdog in this fight, and if they got cocky, they were all going to end up dead. But it was still strange to feel like they were fighting a defensive battle when they were the invaders here.

The problem, Lance thought, was that they didn't have contingency plans, or at least not enough of them. They had their miniature exclusionary zone with the patrols at the borders to warn them of impending attacks, but they had no clear ranking system to distinguish a raid of sentry-manned fighters from an onslaught of two dozen warships. That meant they responded to every alert with their full force.

Thus the fluffy Galra passed out on Lance's lap in full armor.

(Lance would have joined him in a heartbeat if he didn't know it was just delaying the inevitable.)

They _had_  to get smarter about this. Respond appropriately, and not in a panic. Act like they were fighting a war, not a series of battles. And, yes, they had to be defensive about the fight, at least until Karen and Thace got back to them with good news about the Chettok resistance, but fighting the war on Zarkon's terms wasn't doing anyone any good.

Right now, they were playing an inter-galactic game of chicken with the largest military in the universe, and though they'd won every battle so far--and won them soundly--all it would take was a momentary misstep and Zarkon would ground them to dust.

It was a tricky situation, but tricky in the way _eshet_  was tricky. Like a puzzle with a solution hidden somewhere in the mess of numbers. Lance wanted to find that solution. Maybe if he did, Shiro and Allura would finally be able to breathe for two seconds instead of working themselves until they dropped, then getting launched back into the action a couple of hours later.

Keith shifted, rolling over and winding his arms around Lance's waist. Lance dropped a hand to comb his fingers through Keith's hair, a smile tugging at his lips.

"You're still up?" Keith asked, his voice muffled in Lance's stomach.

Lance pursed his lips. "It's been, like, and hour, babe. I've barely made any progress."

Keith grunted, and Lance thought he might go back to sleep, but after a moment he rolled onto his back and peered up at Lance, squinting against the room's bright lights. "You're... worried?"

Lance resisted the urge to make a quip and shrugged. "Sure. This is the biggest fight of the war so far. I guess the battle for Earth comes close, on a personal level, but this is way bigger that if you just look at the numbers. I want to make sure we get this right."

Keith wrinkled his nose, watching Lance through half-lidded eyes for a long moment before he said, "No, that's not it."

"What do you mean, that's not it?" Lance set his tablet aside and propped his elbow on the back of the couch. "It is."

Keith shook his head. "When you're thinking about war stuff, you get all intense. When you're jittery, you're _worried._ " He reached up with one claw and poked the tip of Lance's nose, making him jump. "What are you worried about?"

Lance opened his mouth to insist that he wasn't worried about anything, except how to come out of this campaign with enough of an army left to dismantle the rest of Zarkon's Empire. He couldn't force the words out, though, and turned his gaze to the far wall. "I guess I'm just wondering whether I should have made my family get to safety before we started this."

"Safety?" Keith snorted. "There's no such thing."

He didn't mean his words to sting, Lance was sure, but they did anyway, and Lance's shoulders hitched toward his ears. He'd been having this same debate with himself for the last few days, chasing himself in circles as he tried to fall asleep and running out of things to say every time he saw his family at meals or after battle.

The simple truth was, _nowhere_  was safe. They'd thought New Altea was safe, but Zarkon had found it, and attacked it. They'd thought Earth was safe, before that, but the Empire had been there for years before anyone knew they existed. Maybe the castle-ship wasn't safe, either; maybe he shouldn't have brought them into a war zone. But where else could he have sent them that wouldn't leave him just as knotted up inside? At least here he would know when they were in danger.

"Yeah," he said with a huff. "I know. It's stupid."

"It is," Keith said, apparently going all-in with the tactless approach. "They could have sent themselves away if they were worried. You don't have to do everything for them."

"Yeah, and Luz is _eleven_. You think she understands the kind of danger we're facing here?"

Keith crossed his arms on Lance's thighs, resting his chin atop them. "I think she understands a lot more than you give her credit for-- _and_  I think she's better positioned to defend herself than most of your family."

Lance glanced down sharply, suspicion tickling the back of his mind. "What do you mean?"

Keith shrugged, yawning. "She's been training in self-defense. Pretty good at it, too."

He said it so nonchalantly, like combat training was a totally normal thing for an eleven-year-old to do.

Well, _okay,_  the Galra kiddos they'd rescued from Revinor had started younger than that, some of them. _Keith_  had started younger than that, for that matter. He probably _did_  think it was normal. Lance, on the other hand, did _not._

"She's been _what?_  How long have you known about this?"

"I dunno. Couple weeks?" He looked like he was ready to go back to sleep, and Lance pinched his ear. Keith flicked it, cracking his eyes to glare at Lance.

Lance glared right back. "A couple _weeks_? And you just let her get on with it?"

"I mean, I offered her some pointers. Ran her through some exercises I learned when I was her age. I think she's more comfortable with Edi, though, so..." He shrugged.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Lance grunted. Maybe it was the fatigue, or maybe it was his boyfriend's unbelievable obliviousness, but he felt a headache coming on. "Keith. Babe. She's _eleven_. Are you serious right now?"

"Hey." Keith grabbed Lance's hand and pulled it away from his eyes, twining their fingers together and slow-blinking at Lance like the cat he was, but damn it all if it didn't melt Lance, just a little. "She's fine. Better than fine. She's pretty good, actually, and Edi's cautious enough for the both of them. I wouldn't have left them to it if I thought there was a chance someone was going to get hurt. Besides. Aren't you the one who told me they're going to be paladins someday?"

"Assuming they survive that long," Lance muttered.

A smile tugged at Keith's lips. "You get grouchy when you're tired. Did you know that?"

"It's the stress."

"Sleep would help with that, too."

Lance gave him an unamused look and reached for his tablet, but Keith batted it out of his hands. (Goddamn _cat._ )

"Just a quick nap," Keith said. "You'll feel better."

That was true, if only because they both knew a quick nap would turn into ten hours as long as they weren't interrupted by another battle before then. Keith was right, and Lance knew it, but he'd promised himself he would put together a couple of proposals for Shiro and Allura to take to the Coalition before he passed out.

"Ten minutes," Lance said.

"Uh-huh." Keith flung an arm over his eyes. "So can I drag you off to bed when ten minutes comes and goes and you're still working?"

"It won't come to that. I promise."

It did, in fact, come to that, and Keith carried Lance, bridal style, all the way back to his room. The walk gave Lance time to finish up his proposal and send it off, and when Keith dumped him unceremoniously onto the mattress, Lance slid the tablet onto his bedside table, set an alarm, and then scooted over to make room for Keith, who collapsed without a word. Both of them were still in their armor, but neither had the energy to change that, and they were out cold before Lance worked out when, exactly, he'd last showered.

* * *

Early the next morning--earlier than Karen had ever been up--they roused themselves and got ready for another stake out. They'd rented a cheap room near the port, three of them crashing together on the lone bed and hard couch while Tosk kept an eye on the cameras, just in case the rebels slipped themselves in in the dead of night, more than twelve hours before the gunner was set to arrive.

He didn't spot anyone suspicious, and he gratefully collapsed onto the bed while Thace, Karen, and Evri headed for the port. They chose a different vantage this time, at a lookout high on a bluff. It gave a lovely view of the plains beyond, with their rich rust color and a glittering green river cutting through in and the mountains in the distance like sepia shadows against the sky.

None of them was much interested in the view right now, except for the view, off to one side of the platform and almost directly down, of the plaza in front of the port gates.

Once more, Thace settled in to watch for god only knew what, with Evri keeping him silent company and Karen wondering why she was here. She watched the feed on and off, but she had no more idea today what she was looking for than she had yesterday. Thace and Evri whispered every now and again over someone they deemed suspicious, compiling a list of suspects, presumably. The Imperial gunner hadn't arrived yet, so Karen supposed they were planning on cross-checking their list with people who left shortly after its arrival. Maybe.

Karen honestly didn't know, but she did know that asking would only distract them, so she crossed her arms on the railing and stared out over an alien landscape, watching the silhouettes of ships drop down from the sky. Hours passed. Tosk slept through the alarm he’d set that was meant to get him down here in time for the Imperial gunner’s arrival, or maybe he’d never set one to begin with. Karen went to get them all some food, waved to Evri when she went to rouse Tosk, closed her eyes and focused on the flame inside her that was Pidge, vibrant and with Val's flame close beside it. Somewhere in the darkness were the other paladins. She could feel them, now and again, though she couldn't visualize their lives like she could her own paladins.

Thace didn't shout when he spotted them. In fact, he hardly made a sound, but he'd been so still for so long that the rustle of his flight suit as he straightened was enough to draw Karen's eye.

"What?"

Thace glanced over his shoulder, his lips turning down in a frown, then pocketed his display and leaned over the railing, his eyes fixed on the plaza as he made his way down the hill, following the curving path. "Maybe nothing," he said. "If this is who we want, they're an excellent actor."

But something had obviously raised his suspicions. Maybe a gesture, maybe an instinct he couldn't explain, but whatever it was, it was enough to make him want to see where this person went. He hesitated once more at the bottom of the hill, calling Evri and Tosk to ask for an ETA. When he got no answer, he scowled, then darted out into the street. Karen followed, her heart in her throat. She could have laughed at herself, getting jumpy over something so small, but for all this had taken them a full day, she felt she hadn't had any time to prepare.

There certainly wasn't time now. Thace spotted his target in the crowd and took off in pursuit.

They set a brisk pace through the city, venturing beyond the narrow corridor Karen had seen so far. In some ways, it was very much like every American city Karen had ever visited: towering buildings; broad, busy streets packed with so many people you could hardly keep on track for all the jostling. True, instead of cars there were small ships that flew overhead, and the windows on the buildings had an unusual orangish tint. And of course, Karen was the only human in sight.

She didn't have much energy to spare playing spot-the-difference, as the chase led them up hills and around street performers and markets that seemed to have popped up out of nothing. Karen wouldn't have thought she'd miss downtown traffic, but without the natural pause at intersections, she found herself flagging after the first ten minutes. She kept up--her training with Thace meant she was in better shape than she had been for ten years--but she couldn't stop to think, much less ask Thace what happened if it turned out they were tailing the wrong person.

This person had left in the middle of a shift, though, which Karen had to admit was odd.

The dark alley with a secluded cellar entrance, even more so.

Karen and Thace had hardly turned down the alley, breaking from the bustle of the main street, when the figure they'd been tailing spun around, drawing a concealed pistol and firing two shots. 

* * *

Akira was incredibly slippery, when he wanted to be. Coran had known this, in a general sense, for some time. It was one of the things they had in common, along with a tendency to laugh through the pain, and a knack for shifting the focus back onto whoever was trying to coddle them.

Coran was aware that all of these, taken together, constituted something that might be considered a character flaw and certainly meant a great deal of frustration for people like Allura, who saw through Coran's cheery facade but hadn't yet mastered the art of breaking his guard. Coran was sorry to be the cause of her frustration, but not sorry enough to change his ways.

Not until the same routine was turned against him, that was.

"You're sure he's down here?" Allura asked, lengthening her stride to catch up with Meri, who was at the head of their little spearhead formation.

"Val snitched on him," Meri said. "She knows I've been trying to corner him for two weeks, even if she doesn't know why."

Did Coran feel bad about cornering Akira, triple-teaming him with the ever-formidable duo of Allura and Meri? A bit. But Akira had proved far too skillful at avoiding difficult conversations, beginning the moment he emerged from the cryopod after Keena had stabbed him in her effort to steal Keith away. If Akira wanted to be difficult, then Coran was just going to have to step up his game.

They'd gone too long already without speaking about the changes Coran had noticed on Akira's baseline scans.

Thus the united front marching down together to a private training room in the upper reaches of the Guard's dedicated ward in Blue Tower. The area was, technically, still closed to civilians, but the Guard wasn't yet back to its full glory and mainly confined itself to a tighter ring of training rooms and personnel quarters. If Akira was up here, it wasn't for training so much as a way to be alone.

Another reason to feel a touch guilty about accosting him like this, but Allura had come to find Coran after Akira’s spin in the pods, curious that he’d returned alone rather than with Coran. He’d still been poring over the scans, Allura had seen enough to deduce the truth, and she'd confided in Meri. The two of them, by now, were unstoppable. The least Coran could do was try to mitigate the damage.

Akira's fatigue was evident from the moment the training room door opened. He was fighting a gladiator--level five, if Coran were to hazard a guess. It was quite high for Akira, who had comparatively little training in ground combat, but even despite his exhaustion, he was holding it own.

Coran wondered what could have spurred Akira to throw himself against a gladiator when he was as exhausted as all the rest of them. The paladins had finally relented two days ago and started sleeping in shifts, one paladin for each lion always ready for battle while the other slept, but Red wouldn't fly without Akira there, so he alone gleaned no benefit from the new schedule. Allura and Meri could both testify to the way he'd dragged all through the last battle. Coran had fully expected him to find the nearest horizontal surface on which to pass out.

Instead, he'd come here. Or rather, Red had. The brilliant golden blaze in their eyes testified that she was out in full force. Coran hoped Akira's mind was getting some rest, at least, even if his body wasn't.

Coran had refrained from pushing the issue of Akira's scans these last weeks in part because of the stress he was already under, but it was clear now that an intervention of some sort was needed.

"Akira!" Meri snapped, her voice cutting through the rhythmic shuffle of feet and the thump of flesh on metal. Red jumped, her next block clumsy, and Coran hastened to call off the gladiator before someone got hurt.

By the time Akira recovered and turned toward the door, he was himself again, the gold gone from his eyes, a familiar smile splashed across his face.

The bags under his eyes weren't so easy to get rid of.

"Hey!" he called, breathless. He raised a hand in a wave, then jogged over to greet them, dispensing a towel and water pouch from the storage panel by the door. "What brings you three out here? I'd've thought you'd be asleep."

Meri crossed her arms, a subtle shift smoothing out the lines at the corners of her eyes that might have betrayed her fear. Coran _tsked_ at the sight, but Meri was a woman on a mission, and she jabbed two fingers into the meat of Akira's shoulder. "Funny. I'd have said the same about you."

Akira stumbled back with the force of Meri's jab, but if his smile wavered at all, he hid it behind his water pouch as he guzzled it down. "I'm headed that way soon, actually. Just trying to clear my mind first. What's the point of staring at the ceiling for five hours, am I right?"

The joke fell flat, and Akira's gaze darted away, his free hand scratching his neck.

"Sorry, you must have come here for a reason. Something happening with the Guard?"

"Something happening with _you_ ," Meri said, perhaps a bit too accusatory for the subject they were trying to broach.

Allura must have thought so, too, for she placed a hand on Meri's shoulder and stepped forward to capture Akira's attention. "We've been trying to talk with you for some time, now," she said kindly. "It's difficult with the war, of course, but this really isn't something that can wait. It's about your scans."

The change in Akira's demeanor was as instantaneous as it was telling, and Coran's heart sank. Had he already guessed? There likely wouldn't have been any signs yet, but Red's instincts being what they were--and Akira likely being more sensitive to Quintessence since their fusion--he might have noticed the changes.

Whatever the case, the mere mention of his scans had him as tense as a tripwire, the last vestiges of his smile crumbling. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his towel and tossed it in the laundry chute on his way to the door. Despite the bodies between him and escape, he didn't slow, as though he meant to shoulder his way to freedom.

Coran caught him by the arm. "Akira."

Akira pulled back and twisted away, his expression unreadable. "Look, I really don't have time for this right now, okay? I told you, I'm about to drop. Can we wait until we've all had a good night's sleep?"

"What, in six months?" Meri scoffed. "No. It can't wait that long."

Akira's shoulders rose, and then, all at once, the fight drained out of him. His shoulders slumped, and he ran a hand down his face. When it fell away, the mask was gone, and he only looked weary. "Fine. How long do I have?"

The question speared Coran, and for long seconds, he didn't know how to answer.

Akira, though, didn't wait for him to find his voice. He turned to pace the small training room, gesticulating wildly as he walked. "I'm not stupid, you know. Human and kotha together? That was never supposed to happen. It's changed me, and now I'm dying." He rounded on them. "Don't try to sugar coat this, all right? Just give me a number."

Meri shot a frantic look at Coran, who did his best to ignore it in favor of focusing on Akira. "It's impossible to say exactly--"

"Then give me a ballpark." Akira spread his arms wide, the plea in his voice cracking like brittle glass. "Weeks? Months?"

"Centuries," Coran whispered. He'd never watched someone shatter quite so exquisitely as Akira did then. First, a moment of stillness, Coran's answer slow to penetrate the panic Akira had wrapped himself up in. His lips parted, like he was going to fight the verdict, but then his face scrunched up. He reached a hand behind him, groping for the wall, and didn't sit so much as drop, his eyes staring through the floor.

Coran was at his side in a heartbeat, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and guiding Akira's head down onto his shoulder as he began to model the deep, even breaths Akira was struggling to take in.

"Take your time," Coran started.

But of course, Akira wasn't having any of that. He pulled back, searching Coran's face like he was waiting for a punchline. " _Centuries?_ " he asked. "That's not-- That can't be right."

"Perhaps not," Coran said. "As I said, I can't give you an exact number. It could be as few as a hundred years from now that your body will give out." (It _was_ possible, though Coran suspected it would be several times that.) "What I know is that your body has regenerative properties I've never seen in a human before, and your Quintessence has a deeper, slower flow normally seen in long-lived species. You have a long life ahead of you, Akira. Longer than you would have had if you'd never left home." He softened his voice, smoothing Akira's hair back from his face and catching his eye. "Perhaps longer than you might like."

Akira shook his head. "No. _No._  I'm dying, Coran. I can _feel_ it."

" _You_  can feel it?" Allura asked, kneeling beside Coran and placing a hand on Akira's knee. "Or Red can?"

Meri sat on Akira's other side, her hands remaining in her lap with a visible effort. "Voltron was meant to last forever, after all. And the stories of the perekotha all say they lived a thousand years or more. Compared to that, it _would_  feel like her life had been cut short."

Akira kept shaking his head, curled his hands into fists. "No. No, that's not how this is supposed to go, okay? _I'm_  the one who decided to sacrifice myself. If anyone's going to die, it should be me."

"No one's dying, Akira," Allura said. "It's okay."

"No it's not! You're telling me I'm going to live another hundred years, two hundred, three hundred-- _god._  The best I can hope for is that I only outlive my friends by twenty or thirty years! Keith, Matt, Pidge, Takash--" He cut off with a ragged gasp. "No. I can't do that. I can't watch him die again."

"Akira, that's a long way off."

Akira silenced Meri with a scathing look. "But it's going to happen. I'm going to watch my brother die when I might not have even hit middle age, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. That's what you're saying, right? I'm going to watch _everyone_  die--everyone--I can't--"

Meri lunged forward, planting her hands on the ground on either side of Akira's legs. "Not everyone," she said, leaning in close so their noses were inches apart. "Whatever happens, Akira, you're not going to have to face it alone. You hear me?"

He stared at her, seeming not to comprehend what she'd just said.

With a sigh, Coran touched Akira's shoulder, drawing his attention once more. "I know this is difficult to wrap your head around. I know it's not a pleasant thought to contemplate. We've all been where you are now, although I'll admit we had the advantage of growing up knowing we belonged to a long-lived people."

"You..." Akira blinked, his eyes slow to focus, his tongue stumbling over his words. "What do you mean?"

"Alteans were an insular people, once," Coran said. "Even after we discovered the secrets of space travel and made contact with other worlds, our people as a whole remained at home. When Alfor's grandmother began construction on the Castle of Lions, she was regarded as eccentric, and most people considered it a matter for the aristocracy--a diplomatic move and nothing more. I doubt very much that our people thought we would make a life for ourselves in space, surrounded by fleeting lives. Working with them, befriending them, _marrying them_ , in a few cases. I'm given to understand our lives were something of a melodrama to those back home."

"They didn't understand it," Meri said. "Why some people would choose to subject themselves to loss over and over again. You know that I grew up on a merchant vessel?"

Akira nodded. "Your parents'."

"Mm. After the first century, it started to get to my parents. It started to get to _me._  They'd worked with multiple generations of the families of their first partners. Many of the children I played with when I was young had already died by the time I was old enough to understand that that was normal. That those people hadn't just gone away, and they hadn't died too soon. They grew old. They had children, and their children had children, and I played with their children's children's children."

Meri pulled her knees up to her chest and crossed her arms atop them. "It became a sort of rite of passage," she said, "for those of us who lived among the stars. You reach a point where you realize that's going to be your life, and you have to make a choice. My parents decided to return to Altea, to reconnect with old friends who hadn't aged any more than my parents themselves." She glanced at Allura and offered a somber smile. "I chose to come here--a fresh start, away from my ageing playmates, yes. But I didn't want to hide from the rest of the universe."

"Why?" Akira asked. "Why put yourself through that?"

"Because it's worth it," Coran said. "I've outlived a good few friends in my time, but as much as it hurts to lose them, it doesn't outweigh the time we had."

"We may outlive them," Allura murmured, "but our lives are enriched for having known them, and our hearts learn to make room for the future alongside the past."

Coran's eyes burned as he recognized Lealle's words. She'd loved fiercely, embracing all those who entered her orbit. She'd never lost that part of her, even after nearly three hundred years in the sky. She'd been a paladin for most of that time, her and Keturah both persisting through four, nearly five generations of paladins, but she loved and trusted her last team as well as she'd loved and trusted the first.

"Take it one day at a time," Coran advised, patting Akira's shoulder once more. "Breathe, and enjoy what you have. Whatever happens, you still have decades with this team. Don't let the fear of what the future holds sully what you have now."

Akira shook his head. "I don't know if I can do that."

"You can," Coran said.

Meri reached her elbow out to nudge him, her smile a little brighter than before. "You've got us, after all. We'll help you through it."

Akira stared at her, at them all, until the tension riding in his shoulders eased and a small smile touched his eyes. "Okay," he said. "One day at a time."

* * *

Thace flattened Karen against the wall as two lasers seared the air where they’d been standing a moment before. Then, while Karen was still recovering from the shock of almost dying, Thace stepped in front of her, hands held high. Karen's hand reached for the pistol at her waist, but she stopped herself from drawing it. It would do far more harm than good here, especially in her hands.

"Wait," Thace said. "Please, we're not an enemy."

The woman before them laughed, her pistol leveled at Thace's head. "Oh, of course not. I'm nothing but a loyal Imperial subject, sir."

Her voice was dry, her eyes hard, and Karen thought she might like this woman--once she decided not to shoot them.

Thace didn't waver, his hands hovering at eye level. They weren't even shaking, which was more than Karen could say of hers. "I'm not with the Empire, my friend. And I wouldn't be talking to you if I thought you were."

Belatedly, Karen realized that this was why she'd come along--her strength lay in swaying the opinions of juries--and paranoid rebel saboteurs. "He's telling the truth," she said, putting her hands up the way Thace had before edging to the side far enough for the rebel woman to see her--and to see that she wasn't a Galra.

The woman was clearly Alayu; like most of the people Karen had seen on the streets, she had translucent teal skin that showed deep blue veins underneath. Her eyes were a solid black and overlarge, with a much smaller pair of secondary eyes framing them. She was tall and slender, with narrow shoulders and a neck that seemed wider than her head.

"Let's pretend I believe you," she said. "You're not with the Empire. Who _are_  you with, then?"

Karen felt the urge to divulge every detail in an attempt to win this woman over, but she'd learned over the years that short, simple statements were often more effective. "Voltron," she said softly.

She hadn't been sure word of Voltron had penetrated the Greater Chettok, where the Empire had a more formidable presence here than almost anywhere else, but the rebel woman's eyes widened, the barrel of her gun dipping for just an instant before she caught herself and steadied her hand.

"A myth," she said. "That's the best you can do?"

"Voltron is no myth," Thace began, but Karen quieted him with a hand on his arm.

She stepped around him, keeping her hands up where the woman could see them. "I know it sounds unbelievable, but we haven't come without proof. Most of it will have to wait until we're somewhere more secure, but I have images, recordings, if you'd like to see."

After a moment, the woman nodded, and Karen pulled a holo cylinder out of her pocket, moving slowly and telegraphing every motion. She held it up for the woman to see, then set it down and rolled it across the alley.

The woman stopped it with her foot. When she crouched to retrieve it, her gun remained level, the dark pit of the barrel swimming large in Karen's vision even from twenty feet away. Hardly looking at the cylinder, the woman fumbled for the switch, then darted a glance over as a recording of Voltron's latest battle played out. "So Voltron is real," she said. "Doesn't mean they sent you."

"Look at the rest of it," Karen said, waiting in silence as the woman flicked through the other files: videos from the paladins' armor cams showing them in battle on the ground, showing their faces, before a still image of each paladin appeared in turn. "I don't know if you've heard of the Champion, or that he became a paladin after he escaped the Empire." Karen waited for a flicker of recognition as Shiro's image appeared, and smiled when it came. She'd timed her words well, and the woman actually paused on the image for long seconds, her hairless brows furrowing as she took him in.

Her eyes darted back to Karen. "You're the same species."

"Human," Karen said with a nod. The noise of the street, just a few feet behind her, plucked at her nerves, and she stepped up the pace. "Our planet was only recently dragged into this war, so you won't see many of us about. More than that, several of the paladins are my children."

The woman swiped again, bringing her to Matt and Pidge's photos, and she compared them both to Karen for several silent seconds. Karen had worried that another species would struggle to recognize the features she shared with her children, but Karen had deliberately placed Hunk and Shiro first among the human paladins' photos, not only so she could bring up the famous Champion early, but also because Hunk and Shiro were the most physically distinct from the Holts--their hair, their build, their facial structure, the shape of Shiro's eyes and the color of Hunk's skin. Not knowing what features an Alayu might look to, Karen had wanted as many as possible on display.

It seemed to work. At least made the woman more curious than murderous, like she might like to take some more time to talk with Karen and Thace before she shot them. And more time only meant more chances to convince her of their honest intent.

Someone moved at the far end of the alley, and at first Karen didn't pay it any mind, mistaking it for ordinary city traffic, and then for Tosk and Evri finally catching up with them.

Only when Thace shoved her to the ground, raising his pistol at the same moment and opening fire, did Karen think twice about it.

The rebel woman cursed, flattening herself against the wall. She dropped the holo stick to steady her pistol in both hands, and only then realized that Thace hadn't been aiming for her.

Two Galra in Imperial uniforms stood at the far end of the alley, though one dropped, clutching his chest, before Karen could fully grasp the situation. She scrambled back, away from the open air at the center of the alley, and wedged herself between two metal cannisters stacked by the wall. From here, she couldn't see the fight happening at the other end of the alley.

She _could_  see the nearer alley entrance, and the three additional Imperial soldiers who melted out of the crowd to block it.

Another salvo of lasers split the air with their sizzling screams, and the pedestrians finally took notice, some jerking to a stop, others picking up the pace.

When Evri dropped from above to slit the throat of the leftmost Imperial, the crowd took their cue and scattered, leaving a wide berth around the alley and the skirmish happening within. Smart of them. Karen wished she could scatter with them. Whatever delusions she'd had of charging into battle beside her children, taking her husband back by force, they were clearly that: delusions.

She was no warrior.

A body slammed into one of the cylinders beside Karen, knocking it into her, and she bit down on a cry as she and an Imperial soldier went down with a cacophonous crash. He groaned, picking himself up, and Karen froze, her legs pinned beneath him, her head spinning as she forgot how to breathe.

She heard Thace calling her name, saw the flash of laserfire all around. Too much of it for the handful of attackers she’d seen so far; reinforcements must have arrived.

The man who had fallen on her hiding spot finally noticed her and cocked his head to the side as though trying to figure out how much of a threat she might be.

In that instant, Karen moved on instinct. Her hand found the gun at her waist. She freed it from its holster, brought it up and around, and fired before the soldier had a chance to make his decision.

He dropped unceremoniously at her feet, and she stared at him, her mind a tempest of white noise as the battle continued on around her.

It was over too soon, Karen still frozen on the ground as the alley around her fell deathly silent. Thace was at her side before she'd processed the silence, and the pinched look on his face as he looked her over finally snapped her out of her shock.

"I'm fine," she said, accepting the hand he offered her and climbing to her feet. Her knees shook, but she drew calm around her like a cloak and faced the rebel woman once more. “Do you believe us now?”

Indecision warred on the woman’s face. Karen could see her weighing the odds that Thace had set all of this up as a ploy to win her trust.

"It doesn't matter if she believes us," Evri snapped. "We need to get off the street before someone else comes after us."

She chirruped as the woman started to protest, a sound that might have been cute in another context. With the fire in Evri's eyes, the fists she held clenched at her side, and--was that _blood_ streaking her armor?

Not even the rebel woman's suspicion could stand against the urgency in her voice.

"Fine," the woman said. "This way."

They followed her--not through the cellar entrance, as Karen had anticipated, but up a rickety ladder to the fire escape, and from there to the third story, which was some sort of parking garage, and open to the street on either side. Thace gestured for Karen to go first, while he hung back with Evri. He murmured a question, and Evri trilled in annoyance that covered her distress poorly.

"Tosk is dead," she said shortly, and Karen's foot slipped off its rung. Neither her friends below nor the rebel above noticed, but Karen clung there, a dead Imperial soldier staring back at her from the shadow of the building. "I don't know how they found us, and I don't care. We're going to get this alliance. We're _not_  going to let Tosk die in vain."

Evri shook the fire escape as she mounted it, and Karen forced herself to keep moving.

Secure the alliance. That was what she'd come here to do.

She couldn't fail now. She _had_ to succeed.

For Tosk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of scene mentioned in the trigger warnings at the beginning of the chapter: Coran, Allura, and Meri confront Akira about his scans. He tries to dodge, and ultimately reveals that he thinks he's dying. The truth is, merging with Red cut _Red's_ life short, but Akira is likely to live far longer than the average human. He panics at the thought of watching his brother and most of his friends die, and the Alteans comfort him. They've been through the same realization, and they promise to stay with him, whatever happens.


	34. Political Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keena's making moves on her plot to usurp the Imperial throne, trading the Accords for a spot in Zarkon's good graces. The paladins and the Coalition have begun the assault on the Greater Chettok Galaxy, but ultimately they're just stalling for time. Karen and Thace have made contact with a member of the Chettok rebellion, but they were ambushed, a member of their team killed in the process. They still need to reach an agreement with the rebellion so the campaign can move forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, special note here that I finally caught back up with the chapter summaries after getting behind by about 12 chapters. Those summaries, as always, can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONOvacvwBb13SZO3-sMtCbQzVEHWP0ej1oHgh7janDQ/edit?usp=sharing)
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Mentions of previous deaths (Tosk's, as well as the many unnamed agents of the Accords.)

The halls of the _Sentry_ felt colder since the news broke. Dez knew it was all in her head--she hoped it was all in her head. _She_ knew that an overwhelming majority of her fellow agents had been found out and either killed or sent to the Questioners, because Kolivan had sent out an emergency alert to Dez and anyone else who remained.

She hadn't heard anything through official channels. Zarkon seemed to be playing this close to his chest for once, and Dez hated it. The only reason to be quiet about destroying an enemy spy network was if you were still hunting for the stragglers.

She thought, again, of Kolivan's offer. Immediate extraction. If she could separate herself from the main fleet, he would send someone for her. She could go home. A life as a soldier, or as an adviser to the Coalition, wasn't exactly what she had pictured for herself, but there was no denying that it would be a more comfortable life than the one she'd known. She could retire from this job, maybe start a family. (She'd never felt any particular urge to start a family before, but that was the sort of thing people did when they weren't expecting to die at every turn.)

She could have a _future._

It was a moot point now, of course. She'd respectfully declined Kolivan's offer, erased all traces of the message that contained it, both to keep herself safe in case the Questioners came knocking, and to eliminate the temptation.

She still had work to do, after all. Now more than ever. With the Accords in shambles, Voltron and their Coalition were suddenly blind. They needed someone on the inside. Staying might get Dez killed, but it could also save lives. Billions of them, potentially. She would save as many as she could and hope it was enough to secure a future not for herself, but for the entire universe.

A week had passed since Kolivan's message, and life went on as usual. Dez was still head of security on the _Sentry_. Prorok still called on her for input on personnel decisions. She still had patrols to arrange, inspections to carry out, quarterly reviews to conduct. The ship might feel colder and more hostile than it had before, but that was just Dez, looking past the thin veneer of routine to see the danger that had always lurked just behind closed doors.

A message appeared on her display screen, informing her that Prorok had cancelled their morning meeting, and Dez fought down an immediate surge of panic. Prorok cancelled meetings sometimes. Zarkon demanded his time, or some new hunt stole his attention, or he simply woke without the patience to deal with the bureaucracy. It wasn't a danger sign. It didn't mean she'd been found out.

If she had been, in fact, he would have gone out of his way not to tip her off. Or, he would if he was smart. The fact that Prorok was actually kind of an idiot and very well _might_  tip her off didn't help with the nerves.

The worst part was, Dez had no way of knowing what it would look like. Since Thace's departure last year, Dez was the only agent on the _Sentry_. There had been no arrests here--a good thing, as anyone who might have been sent to replace Thace likely could have betrayed Dez, but also unfortunate, as it gave Dez no information about how they would approach her if and when they did discover her true loyalties.

A knock on the door set Dez's heart thundering, and she cursed herself for losing her nerve, schooling her features as she called out for the visitor to enter.

At first, Dez didn't recognize her. Her face was more lined, her fur graying despite the garish pink dye job she'd adopted. The custom armor she wore, black and slate gray with that same horrendous fuchsia in the trim, gave her a domineering air at odds with the cover she'd assumed during her last stint in the field.

That was the most jarring part, actually: the woman before her didn't shy away from attention, preferring to blend in and work from the shadows. Rather, she seemed to want all eyes on her.

" _Keena_?" Dez broke into a grin despite herself. "Stars! I haven't seen you since--"

Since Keena faked her own death, ending her fieldwork for a chance to get a valuable informant out of Imperial territory. Dez recoiled, brushing past Keena and glancing both ways down the hall outside her office. They didn't appear to have an audience, but she closed the door anyway, keying in the passcode that would activate the full suite of privacy measures she'd had installed here.

"What are you doing here?" Dez hissed, returning to Keena. "You're going to get yourself killed. You're going to get us _both_  killed!"

Keena laughed--still the high, tinkling laugh Dez remembered, but with jagged edges now. "You're as paranoid as ever, I see."

Dez responded with a glare. "It keeps me alive."

Crossing to the desk, Keena gave a shrug and dropped into Dez's chair, sprawled sideways, her feet kicked up over the arm. She grabbed a metal sphere from the desk--a prototype of a new riot suppressor Dez had been given to look over--and twirled it, balancing it on the tips of her claws.

For a long moment, Dez was too stunned to say anything. It had been a long time since Dez had seen her old friend. What was it, now? Thirteen years, maybe fourteen? Keena had made a name for herself in that time, risen to the rank of Spymaster--and then fallen, for reasons Dez still didn't understand. All she had was a short, clipped message directing her to disregard any orders she received from Keena ve Lokth and to pass along any information that might lead to her apprehension.

As the seconds ticked by and no one came to arrest them both for conspiracy against the Emperor, Dez began to relax, and as she relaxed, she began to put the pieces together.

Keena was here openly, dressed in colors that demanded attention, knocking on Dez's door rather than accosting her somewhere away from the public corridors of the ship. She wore custom armor--Imperial work, not anything she might have had done on New Altea, or wherever else she'd been recently. Zarkon's crest was painted on her chest in blood red, clashing with the pink accents.

It was an officer's attire. High-ranking. Someone important. Someone _recognized._

The Accords had been compromised. Not bit by bit. Not months of disappearances, of whispers, of Questioners following the trail from agent to agent. One fell swoop, and hundreds of agents were gone.

Dez could count on one hand the number of people who could have leaked that many names.

"What is this?" Dez asked, slipping amusement into her voice so Keena didn't see the horror. "Don't tell me you managed to worm your way back into Zarkon's good graces."

Keena spread her hands, the metal sphere balanced in one palm. "Naturally. I'm nothing if not adaptable."

"Looks like you've climbed the ladder. What are you, now? Commander?"

Keena's smile was predatory--not a direct threat, not to Dez, but the smile of someone who knew she was untouchable. "Prince, actually. Lord Zarkon in his _infinite_ wisdom granted me my husband's old rank."

Dez was slow to reign in her shock, and Keena laughed, tossing the prototype back onto the desk and rising to her feet, the motion fluid. Confident. Keena was a young woman when she worked in the field, married for six years and a mother for five. She'd been hungry to make a difference, spurring her brother to follow her into this line of work--but she'd been uncertain, deep down. She'd worried about making a mistake.

That fear was gone, now, and Keena's smile dared her enemies to try to bring her down.

"It's a long story," Keena said with a wave ofher hand. "I'm here, and I've secured my place with Zarkon--but really, it's all so that I'll be in a position to take up the reigns once Zarkon and his witch are out of the picture."

"Clever," Dez said, with more conviction than she felt. "How'd you manage that?"

Dez wasn't sure what she'd expected. Maybe that Keena would dance around the obvious truth, try to sugar coat it.

She didn't.

"I gave Zarkon the Accords." Keena plastered on a look of--not quite remorse. Grief, maybe. "Traded their names for his trust. It needed to be something big like that. Oh, but don't worry--I left you off the list, and I made sure anyone who could have named you was... out of the picture."

Dez was going to be sick. In twenty years as a spy, she'd witnessed a great many revolting acts. She'd learned not to react to the horrors of the Empire, as she didn't react to Keena's confession. But it turned her stomach in a way very few things had the power to.

" _Vrekt,_ Keena," Dez whispered. It strayed too close to disgust, and Dez hastened to laugh, shaking her head to buy a few seconds to school her features. "You always were a ruthless bastard."

Keena lifted one shoulder. "I learned from the best. Anyway. I've got a position for you on the  _Emperor's Pride,_ if you're interested."

Zarkon's flagship. _Stars above._  "What sort of position?"

"Personal guard or something." Keena flicked a hand. "We can work out the details later. The important thing is, it gets you in the middle of the action and gives me someone I can count on. Things are going to get ugly before this is through."

Things had already gotten ugly, and Dez would sooner tear Keena apart than work with her after she'd betrayed the agents who'd quite literally trusted her with their lives. But she was right about one thing: it would put Dez in the middle of things, and in a better position to help the Coalition than she had here on the _Sentry_.

Besides. She had a feeling if she refused, her name would find a way onto Zarkon's list, after all.

"You know I don't scare that easy," Dez said with a laugh. "I'm in."

* * *

The noise of the city rang loud in Karen's ears over the deafening silence in the ship around her.

Tosk was dead.

She still couldn't wrap her head around it. Eight hours ago, she'd been laughing with him, just discovering a brusque humor that made for a welcome break to the tension of an undercover mission in enemy space. Eight hours ago, he'd been sprawled across a bed that sagged under his bulk while she headed out with Thace and Evri for another boring day of observation.

The ship--hover-car--whatever it was--skimmed across the city, following seemingly arbitrary but agreed-upon lanes in the sky. There were several layers to these sky-roads, ships rising and falling through them like leafs tumbling in the wind. Nobody dipped too close to the street below, and nobody rose above the crown of the skyscrapers around them, no matter how much Karen wanted to get away from the bustle of a city probably crawling with Imperial troops.

Were more of them on their way to kill Karen and her friends even now?

The dome that covered the ship's interior was tinted dark, more likely to hide the passengers than to ward off the sun, but from within Karen could see their fellow commuters all around. The rebel woman sat at the controls, stone-faced and silent, while Thace tended to Evri. She had an ugly wound on her left arm, scales scraped away and tar-like blood seeping up from underneath. Feathers had been ripped from the crest she had in place of hair, leaving her looking bedraggled and a little patchy.

She bore Thace's ministrations without a sound, however, and once he'd finished bandaging her arm, she gathered it in her lap as though to ward off further injury.

At length, Thace slithered through the narrow center aisle and dropped into the empty seat beside their pilot. "We need to figure out what to do next."

She gave him a hard look, milky eyes narrowing. "That's what I've been doing. I'm still not sure trusting you lot was the best decision, but that's the choice I made, and there's no point second-guessing myself now."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Thace said dryly. "Do you know of somewhere safe we can go until things blow over?"

"I do. But I'm not taking you there until I'm sure we don't have a tail."

Frowning, Karen scanned the sky. She didn't see any obvious signs of pursuit, but neither Thace nor Evri protested the woman's decision. "I'll trust your judgement. If you need a bit of firepower, just give the word. My name is Thace, by the way. My friends are Karen and Evri."

The woman stared at his awkward attempt at a bow, clearly not keen on having a Galra for an ally, but eventually nodded. "Narisa. Strap yourselves in. This could get rough."

As though Narisa had summoned them with her words, a trio of sleek vessels, slender like torpedoes, split away from a higher level of traffic and turned their noses toward Narisa's ship. Karen didn't know how the woman had spotted them in all this traffic, or how long they'd been there, but there was no doubt about their intentions.

Karen was thrown against her harness as Narisa twisted them into a dive, darting between two buildings as bolts of black fire tore through the traffic around them. Karen choked on a scream as two other ships dropped from the sky, trailing black smoke and sending pedestrians scattering in all directions to avoid being crushed.

Thace swung his chair around so it was pointed toward the back of the ship. "Open the canopy," he shouted to Narisa, who complied without letting up on the throttle. They veered around the corner at the far end of the alley, directly into oncoming traffic, and Thace fired twice as Narisa swerved to avoid getting hit.

One of the torpedo ships plummeted to the ground below.

Another trio of chasers joined the hunt before anyone could celebrate the first one down, and Thace took another shot. He must have been familiar with their design to know where to aim, because most of Evri's shots skimmed harmlessly off the sleek silver hulls, where Thace brought a ship down with every two or three shots that landed.

At least Evri was trying, unlike Karen. She held her pistol in her lap, her hands shaking, as they had been since she'd killed the man in the alley. He would have killed her in a moment, and she knew it. She didn't regret doing it, and she couldn't qualify what she was feeling as guilt, but she couldn't deny that she was shaken. Worse than shaken. She couldn't let go of the gun, however she tried, and she wanted nothing more than to toss it over the side of the vessel, let the wind and traffic take it away, pretend she'd never fired it at all.

She closed her eyes, listened to the sounds of laserfire behind her--Thace and Evri shooting down their chasers, the chasers trying and failing to hit Narisa as she careened through the city. Karen wasn't a soldier, and she knew when her contribution would do more harm than good, as it would now.

But she wouldn't give up. She'd survived her first firefight, and she hoped she'd survive this chase. She would get better. She would get to the point where she could bring herself, and her family, home alive.

* * *

There were times Shiro hated his role on this team, hated that he was the sort of person who stepped up and took control. Hated that it meant it often fell to him to break the worst sort of news.

Allura had offered to do it, but Shiro declined. He didn't want to be the one to tell Keith his mother had joined the Empire, but he felt he owed it to him.

They'd brought the whole team together, because they all needed to know, and because it was going to be hard enough to say it once. So they waited, gathered in one of the more comfortable conference rooms, half the team arrayed around the table, the rest standing by the walls, tensed and ready for a fight. They all knew a summons like this couldn't mean anything good.

Keith, unsurprisingly, was one of the ones who remained standing, framed between Pidge and Matt's chairs, his arms crossed, his ears cocked back, his eyes never leaving Shiro's face.

Then, at last, everyone was there, and Shiro took a deep breath as he stood. Every one of the paladins and adjuncts gathered fell silent at once, hanging on Shiro's words.

"We've just spoken with Kolivan. He received a message from one of the few agents of the Accords remaining within the Empire. It would seem Keena is there, acting as one of Zarkon's princes."

Shiro saw the moment Keith stopped breathing, his ears laying flat, his eyes wide and wounded as Shiro faltered.

Allura stepped smoothly into the following silence. "According to the agent, Keena claims she's only there to usurp control of the Empire away from Zarkon, to take control and lead the Empire to a more peaceful future, or some such." She glanced at Shiro. "We don't know how far we can trust this claim, but it changes little. Keena was the one who sold out the Accords, handing Zarkon a list of names to win his trust. Given how much information she had access to when she was an ally, she could do a lot of damage if she decides she needs to give Zarkon any more... assurance."

"Fuck," Matt breathed. "That fucking-- Are you _serious_?"

"Unfortunately." Shiro grimaced. "We don't have much more information right now, but the agent is keeping us apprised of the situation."

"It goes without saying that this doesn't leave this room," Allura added. "Not only would it be a blow to morale, but it would put our agent in grave danger. We have very few informants left within the Empire; it wouldn't be hard for Keena to guess who it was who told us about her plans."

All around the room, people nodded, but they did so distractedly, too busy trying to come to terms with Keena's latest betrayal to care about gossiping with the castle's crew. It wasn't that they didn't expect something like this of Keena, Shiro was sure. Opinions of the woman among the paladins ranged from low to abysmal--but Keena herself had helped to build the Accords. If she was willing to sacrifice that to get what she wanted, what else would she offer up to Zarkon?

They had to assume the answer was everything, and 'everything,' in this case was frighteningly close to the truth. For far too long, Keena's position as Spymaster had granted her nearly unlimited access to Coalition activity, and her access to information on the paladins themselves was only marginally more restricted. Except for the events of the last two or three months, nothing was safe.

Shiro and Allura had already cataloged the security risks with Kolivan during their call. Keena couldn't know anything about Klenahn, thank god. She didn't know that Sam was Shiro's adjunct, or that they could communicate. She didn't know about the recent evolution of the Voltron bond, or exactly how the paladins were tracking the Vkullor--though if she'd been anywhere in the Coalition, or had contacts who were, she did know that the Vkullor was being tracked. And the details of the Chettok plan were no more compromised now than they had always been.

All very important things to be safe, Shiro reminded himself. A lot of what they had in the works, Keena couldn't touch. But everything else...?

"You have to kill her."

Shiro turned to Keith, his heart breaking at the sickened expression on Keith's face. His arms were tightly crossed, his shoulders hunched, and he leaned away from Lance, who reached out for him.

He looked up at Shiro, then turned away.

"It's true. There's too much she can do to us... You have to tell that agent that to kill her."

His voice was flat, tightly controlled. If Shiro hadn't been looking at him, he might have thought Keith was talking about a complete stranger.

"We've considered that," Shiro admitted. "And we're not ruling it out as an option. But as it stands, Keena has invited the agent into a position that gives her access to some of Zarkon's top officers, and to many of his plans. If Keena was being honest about usurping Zarkon, she may work to undermine him. On both counts, it's a win for us."

Keith shook his head. "And then what? Keena gets control of the Empire and turns against us? Even if she doesn't tell Zarkon everything he needs to know to crush the Coalition, she'll just do it herself."

It was, unfortunately, a very real possibility, though Kolivan seemed convinced that Keena didn't want the Coalition destroyed--not until the war was over and she'd tried to strike a bargain with them.

She was, after all, incredibly shrewd. She wouldn't want endless war any more than the rest of them.

"Ultimately, it's not our decision," Allura said. "We've expressed our concern to Kolivan, and we'll take what precautions we can. As I understand it, the agent will be instructed to watch, and wait, and if Keena proves to be more of a liability than an asset, she will be dealt with accordingly."

It felt so wrong to be talking like this about a blood relative of one of his paladins, but Allura's words calmed Keith somewhat. He nodded, shrinking back against the wall, and Shiro was struck by the thought that killing Keena might well be the best option, and not just for the Coalition's sake.

Thoughts like that were the very reason he'd held back when talking with Kolivan, and why he'd parroted Kolivan's arguments just now. The strategic thing to do was to use Keena as much as possible.

Shiro's motivation was far more personal than that.

He just wanted Keena to stop hurting Keith, and he didn't care how that happened.

* * *

Keena prided herself on her patience. Most of the time she did.

Errok screamed as he fell, a gash in his side the length of his forearm. Keena stepped back, accepting the cloth Dez offered and wiping her blade as Haggar gestured to the druid at her side. Errok's wound wasn't fatal--the point of these bouts wasn't to pick each other off, only humiliate your rivals and settle petty feuds--but heading to the infirmary to get patched up would have taken too long. Haggar's compromise was a druid on hand to seal any wounds that couldn't wait until the end of the night's festivities.

It wasn't a pleasant experience, being healed by a druid. By Keena's understanding, it was both painful and deeply invasive. They said you could feel the druid's magic beneath your skin for days after the fact.

Keena wouldn't know; she'd won every one of her matches against the other Princes and their lieutenants, and never taken more than a scratch as penalty.

It was bloody business, being a Prince. Relentless, too. Keena had been a spy for nearly a decade, Spymaster even longer than that. She dealt in difficult choices, vital information, murder, and opportunity, and she'd done so with almost limitless patience. Haste, after all, only got people killed.

Not so anymore.

The universe was less generous than it once had been, and Zarkon's Princes even less so. They were men and women of action, power-hungry and disinclined to wait for the right moment. Here on the _Emperor's Pride_ , the only way to survive was by seizing any chance that came along. Standing still was what got you killed.

It wasn't the way Keena was used to working, but she could adapt. She _had_  to adapt. The war crept closer to Zarkon's center of power every day as the paladins and their allies gained momentum. Keena could slow them, if need be, but she couldn't afford to crush them before they'd dealt with Zarkon and Haggar.

She had only as much time as the paladins allowed her, which meant she had to move fast to secure her power. Mingling with her fellow Princes, clashing with them in their military and political games. She needed their respect, or at least their fear. If Zarkon fell tomorrow, she needed a solid core of support.

She hated being pushed into action like this, but she made do. Zarkon had granted her a small force to command--another test, she suspected. She didn't have a full fleet, and none of her ships had the firepower to win any battle alone, but she could do a fair amount of damage, under the right circumstances.

She got them training at once, meeting with her officers daily to go over their progress and instruct them on the art of tactical warfare, something far too few of Zarkon's officers understood. By day, Dez patrolled the halls of the transport that served as their base of operations, but in the evenings, Keena pulled her to act as a personal guard. A lieutenant, at that. It was practically custom among the Imperial upper crust. You could have a mate or not, but a second--someone to watch your back and to stab your enemies' in theirs--that was something no respectable Prince would be without.

These gatherings being what they were, Keena wouldn't dare attend alone. The only officially condoned violence took place on the glass floor of the dueling ring, where Keena brought men like Errok to their knees as fast as she could goad them into a challenge--but everyone knew the Empire lived and died by the rule of force. Backstabbing, poisoning, and other such "accidents" were only punished if they failed. Keena needed Dez here to watch her back while she targeted the next man on the invisible ladder of Imperial society.

The next pair stepped down into the ring, and Keena and Dez joined the spectators at the railing that overlooked it. A sentry approached with a tray of treats, but Keena waved it off. Her work tonight was not yet finished, and as a rule, she trusted nothing at these gatherings.

It was ironic, really. On New Altea, Keena had hovered on the fringes of high society, despite outranking every politician and military officer who competed for the coveted invites. She could never openly attend the balls and banquets, but she knew of them; she often ran a second layer of security for them. She knew what to expect: gauzy gowns, stiff suits, exquisite delicacies and frippery at every corner, and very little real work getting done. Just another round in the petty games of politicians.

Perhaps Keena had spent too long in the Empire before she escaped, or perhaps she was merely particularly suited to it. Either way, she found the Princes' gatherings a refreshing change of pace. There were no gowns here, only armor; no jeweled clutches and dazzling medals, only weapons, which the Princes drew at the slightest provocation, challenging their rivals to duels disguised as exhibition matches.

There were delicacies, and drinks enough to dull the senses, but Keena wasn't the only one who didn't partake in these. Imperial politics weren't as subtle as New Altean, but they were far more deadly for those not at the top of their game.

The first night, Keena had resolved to observe, to stay on the fringes of the fracas and see where she might gain the most advantage.

By the end of the first hour, it was clear that strategy wasn't going to get her anywhere, and she'd given a minor Prince's lieutenant a new scar before the night was out. It was just the start, a signal to the other Princes that she meant business.

She hadn't stopped since.

These contests reminded her of the Arena, with a ranking system equally rigid, if unspoken. As a newcomer, she had to work her way up to duels with the most powerful members of Zarkon's inner circle.

For three weeks, she dueled and postured and thrust herself into every conversation. The other Princes might hate her, but they would not ignore her. She was here, a force to be reckoned with, and she would not rest until the rest of the Empire had no choice but to recognize that.

As the duel played out on the glass floor below, open space visible below the duelists’ feet as though to enhance the drama of these bouts, Keena's eyes roved the crowd around her. Zarkon sometimes attended these events, but he seemed to take only a passing interest. He liked his Princes to be strong, but he had no real stake in their games. All were equally pawns to him; so long as he had a powerful commander to send into battle, it didn't matter whether that name changed from week to week.

Haggar, though.

Haggar attended every meeting, watched each match with avid interest. She brought druids to see to wounds, but she herself only tended to a bare handful of the injured. She never dueled herself, merely lurked around the edges of the Princes' meetings--technically a Prince herself but removed from their contests. She was Zarkon's Hand, the Chief Druid, a force all her own that none of the rest of them could touch, but Keena was beginning to see the shape of the larger factions at work here.

Haggar headed one faction, choosing Princes and rising stars from the military to sponsor. Keena couldn't prove that the witch cheated to help her favorites gain ranks, but she knew it was happening. A dose of druid magic with the healing they received, or a draining touch for their next opponent.

There seemed to be two or three other factions to rival hers, led by Korzak and Rivvan, the two Princes fighting to claim, once and for all, the power vacuum Sendak had left with his death now nearly two years ago. Keena had only been able to pick out a handful of their allies, mainly by identifying their rivalries with Haggar's chosen.

Ever since identifying these currents of power, Keena had zeroed in on them, ignoring the handful of truly independent Princes and the ones whose loyalties she couldn't suss out. She needed to make a statement, and to make it so bold Haggar couldn't afford to ignore her.

Because Keena was under no illusions that she'd won Haggar's trust. Handing over a list of spies may have been enough to placate Zarkon, but Haggar was much smarter than that. She watched Keena, but she watched the way one watched a rodent who'd snuck into your cargo space: ready to crush it once it was exposed, but not overly concerned with what it was doing in the mean time.

So Keena watched, and whenever one of Haggar's puppets lost a match, Keena challenged their opponent, dealing a decisive victory. When Haggar's puppets _won_ , Keena challenged them directly. In this way, she moved herself up the ranks of Princes, and she did so specifically by outperforming Haggar's pets.

And Haggar noticed. Her eyes followed Keena's trek across the room to Vorket, one of Rivvan's friends who had defeated Haggar's pawn earlier in the night.

What she was doing might infuriate Haggar, but it would at least capture her attention, and that was the first step. Bargaining, sweet-talking, threatening--whatever it took to win Haggar's help, that would come later. After all, Keena didn't need Haggar's favor to get what she wanted.

She only needed the witch's interest.

Vorket agreed to the challenge easily--always one to rise to an insult, that man--and as Keena stepped into the ring with him, loosing her blade in its sheath, she turned to find Haggar at the railing overhead.

Keena smiled, and then she charged, neatly sidestepping the feint and followup that had taken out Haggar's chosen. Her blade dropped into her hand and bit into the meat of Vorket's shoulder, spraying violet across the already blood-slicked glass floor. Vorket howled and charged again, never one to take an easy loss, but Keena was faster and smarter, and in moments she  had him on his knees.

Bloody, hasty work, these Imperial politics, she thought, returning to Dez's side as the druid moved in to heal Vorket's wounds.

Keena had never felt more at home.

* * *

Narisa's flying style reminded Karen, in many ways, of her sons'--and it reminded her sharply of why she'd never gone for a ride in the Red Lion. Thace somehow managed to keep hold of his stomach through the mad chase, picking off Imperial police one by one until the skies were clear enough for Narisa to shake their tail for good.

She didn't slow until they careened into a small hangar that appeared seemingly from nowhere at the base of an otherwise unremarkable building. Karen lurched against her seat belt as they came to an abrupt stop, her stomach heaving, and it took her long minutes to recover enough to stand.

The rest of that first day was a blur, and in the days that followed, Karen mostly remembered a pounding headache and a wall of guards herding her, Thace, and Evri into a small holding cell, where they waited for several hours before being moved, again, to a suite of rooms, where a plain but generous meal was waiting for them. The smell of it made Karen nauseous, but she forced herself to eat a small portion before collapsing in bed.

She expected the negotiations to begin the next day, but they didn't. Nor did they begin the day after that, or the day after that. They were left mostly alone--not locked in their rooms, but any time they poked so much as a finger outside their room, the guards outside glared at them until they retreated.

They were brought meals twice a day, always as plentiful as the first, and never more extravagant. The guards who brought it didn't seem inclined to chat, and left as quickly as they came. The only one who spoke to them was Narisa, who visited them on the second day to assure them that she had vouched for them, and someone named Kyrien was eager to speak with them.

"Eager," but apparently not in any particular rush. As much as Karen appreciated the chance to recover from the fright of that first day, the chance for Evri to recover, physically and emotionally, it was maddening to be stuck in a space the size of a cramped two-bedroom apartment. Karen slept at odd hours, alternating between an exhausted stupor and a mania that gripped her for hours on end, leaving her entrenched in the central common room drafting speeches and proposals to try to sway Kyrien to their side.

Thace occasionally coaxed her to eat or sleep, but more often he joined her.

She suspected he feared his presence was the cause of the delay.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps not. Karen didn't spare it much thought as she drafted one impassioned speech after another. Evri was quiet, rarely leaving her bed except when Thace or Karen dragged her out into the common area to eat. It was understandable, Karen knew. Tosk had been part of her squad in the Guard--one of the very first squads Akira and Layeni had formed after the battle for Earth. They'd lived together, trained together, saved each other's lives for more than a year, and now he was gone.

Perhaps if Karen had known either of them as more than a passing face in the hallways of the castle, she might have been able to offer more comfort.

Instead, all she had was bracing smiles and fleeting hugs and gentle reminders to eat, shower, and sleep--admonitions Karen probably needed to be on the receiving end of, in all honesty. None of them were doing well. Not with Tosk's death, not with this forced inaction, and certainly not, in Karen's case, with only vague impressions of how the war beyond this planet's atmosphere was going.

Thace's favorite way to pass the time, at least today, was spinning theories about how the Empire might have found them.

"Perhaps we're more well-known than we realized." He was curled up on a chair beside Karen, who was entrenched at the desk, scratching out notes and bullet points for her latest speech on a scrap of paper. She'd burned through the one notebook she'd brought along and was now scrambling to find somewhere to scratch a few more words. "I know the Empire knows _me_ , of course. But half of them ought to think I'm dead, and the rest would know I haven't been active in months. Why waste the resources looking for me all the way out here?"

"Perhaps there's another spy on the castle-ship," Karen said, distracted. Thace's chuckle made her tense all over again, and she shot him a glare. He really was far too relaxed for the situation they'd found themselves in. More relaxed than Karen had ever seen him, in fact. Some perverse reaction to stress, apparently.

Half a lifetime as a spy must have scrambled his fight-or-flight instinct.

Thace was quiet for a long while, staring into his mug of tea. He claimed the rebels had given them cheap tea, but he drank it anyway. Karen suspected he liked complaining about the flat, weak taste. "You know what's funny? I could tell you a hundred ways we might have given ourselves away, but I made sure we didn't. Which means I'm missing something. Is the Empire getting smarter? Or am I just out of practice?"

"Maybe the rebels are the ones who got caught," Karen said, giving up on her speech for now. "Have you considered that?"

"I have, and I don't think it's very likely. What are the odds that they tracked the rebellion down the same day we did, following the same agent, and sprang their ambush just as we made contact?"

Karen pursed her lips. "About as good as you forgetting some vital piece of our cover that gave us away, I'd wager."

Thace cracked a smile--a tired sort of smile, which seemed somehow more genuine than all the other ones he'd flashed today. Maybe the relaxed demeanor was just an act, after all.

Before she had a chance to test that theory, the door to their suite slid open, and Narisa bustled in, clapping her hands together. "Look alive, people! Kyrien finally has an open slot, and they're ready to see you."

* * *

Days crept by. Lance and the other paladins kept fighting, kept stealing rest whenever they could. Even with the collapse of the Accords hanging over their heads, there was nothing else they could do.

Lance wasn't sleeping well. Shocking, right? Keena had defected, the best source of information the Coalition had was gone, and none of them was safe anymore. This entire campaign had been a huge gamble from the start, but it had been a little bit safer when they all at least knew that they stood a chance of finding out what the Empire was planning before it came to fruition. Now, they were blind, hoping to their own private gods that Zarkon wasn't even now sending out the force that would be the death of them all.

"We got word back from the Migration," Hunk said over breakfast one morning. Lance didn't know how the man still had the energy to make breakfast, much less plaster on a smile and cling to the last shred of optimism left in this godforsaken war zone. But he did, and Lance appreciated the attempt to cheer him up.

"Yeah?" Lance asked, more because he knew Hunk was waiting for a reaction than because he had the energy to care what was happening across the universe. "They liberate one of those Balmera?"

"Two of them, actually." Hunk dumped a miniature mountain of scrambled eggs onto Lance's plate in a silent admonition to _eat_. "Tackled them simultaneously so the Empire wouldn't be able to devote everything to any one defense."

"Doubt they have much to scramble these days anyway," Lance said. "Zarkon's lobbing it all our way."

Hunk actually laughed at that, and Lance wrinkled his nose. (He did eat, though; Hunk's cooking was not a gift to be taken for granted.) "Anyway, both attacks were a success. I hear Coran opened a pair of wormholes for them. With all the other risks they're taking, I guess they didn't want to wait and hope the Empire didn't track them down."

Lance stuck his fork in his mouth and held it there, considering the news. "I mean, that's gotta be, what? A quarter of what they had left in terms of crystal production?"

"Zarkon hasn't been able to expand his fleet in months," Hunk said. "After this, and with as many ships as we've destroyed in the last three weeks?"

Lance felt a grin tugging at his lips despite his fatigue. "You mean we're actually starting to get somewhere?"

"Zarkon's resources aren't unlimited," Hunk said. "They're not even half as close as they were last year. He can keep throwing fight after fight at us. As long as we keep holding out, he's only hurting himself."

He wasn't _only_  hurting himself, though, was he? Lance didn't want to burst Hunk's bubble, but the Coalition fleet had taken its share of losses. Quite a few of the private fleets and royal guards had been functionally wiped out, the survivors even now being shuffled around and regrouped into new squadrons under Coalition command. It was helping with the fleet's cohesiveness, Lance supposed. They'd already lost more than ten thousand pilots--but those who remained were fighting and flying better than ever. Despite the drop in numbers, the fleet was possibly _stronger_  than when this had all begun.

But this could only continue for so long. Sooner or later, they would lose more people than they could make up for with skilled flying. If they crossed that tipping point before they had Chettok on their side, Zarkon would crush them, and this would all have been for nothing.

Lance just had to hope that didn't happen. They'd had no word yet from Karen and Thace, but they had to be close to making contact with the rebellion. Any day now, they would have an answer for the paladins, or at least a next step.

Until then, all they could do was wait.

* * *

Matt stood on the bridge of the castle-ship, watching the battle that raged beyond the viewscreen. Lasers flashed in the chaotic whirl of passing ships, a cacophony of light that stung his eyes. Dark Voltron was here again. They had been for most of the recent battles--two or three of Zarkon's lions diving into the fray, if not all five. They seemed more intent on hounding the Coalition army than destroying it, content to lead the paladins on a chase, to sew fear and confusion among the patchwork fleets.

It was terrifyingly efficient, even when all the paladins were there to combat it.

Today, it was even worse.

Akira had been pushing himself too hard. They all knew it, and if Matt was honest with himself, he'd known he was going to collapse sooner or later, however good he was at flashing a smile and telling them all it was okay.

It had been nearly a month of almost nonstop battles, and Akira had taken part in every one. The Red Lion wouldn't fly without him--they'd tried, as Matt had tried today once it became clear that they were going to have to make do without Akira. Nothing. Matt thought there might have been a way to get it to move, but he didn't have time to figure it out. It was just a ship without Akira--inert, unintelligent, but theoretically still functional.

Unfortunately, no one had ever had to fly a lion on full manual before. It seemed they'd been doing more instinctively, through the bond, than any of them had realized. Some day, they would have to reverse engineer the process, just in case anything like this ever happened again.

For now, it was futile, and Matt had relocated to the bridge so he could at least track the progress of the battle. It was torture standing here while his friends fought. He wanted to be out there with them. Two Green Lions spiraled through the chaos, mirror images of one another except for the paint job, perfectly matched in speed and maneuverability.

That was another consequence of Akira's exhaustion. No Red Lion meant no Voltron bond, which meant the other lions were only as strong as they'd ever been--and it showed.

"They'll be fine, you know." Coran stood at Matt's shoulder, every bit as tense as Matt himself. "You all have a way of pulling through, no matter what the universe throws at you."

Matt's lips twitched. "Of course. Losing has never been an option."

It was a false bravado, as it always had been. It was just that it was easier not to acknowledge the ever-present fear when you were out in the action. He wondered how often Coran felt like this. How much _more_  often lately, when Zarkon kept sending small, scattered fleets to hound the Coalition. Allura thought the recent battles had torn through too many of Zarkon's warships, making him wary of sending more. Shiro thought it was more about mental warfare. It was easier to take out warships, in some ways--with Voltron, the castle-ship, and the _Hope of Kera_ , firepower was hardly an issue, and the boost to morale that came with taking down something that size gave the rest of their pilots a boost that helped them deal with the stragglers.

But when the entire fight was against a few thousand sentry-manned fighters, there was less to celebrate. Coran and Anamuri's crews were sidelined, unwilling to risk collateral damage by firing into the throngs of fighters in the distance. The paladins were caught up chasing Zarkon's lions.

What remained was endless hours of close, quick fights. The enemy went down quickly, but there was always another close on its tail. Morale started low and hovered there, without any big, decisive victories to bolster it.

Zarkon was wearing them down and saving his stronger ships at the same time, and there was nothing Matt could do about it.

"How bad is it?" Matt asked. He kept his eyes on the battle, but he angled his head toward Coran, dropping his voice low. "Akira, I mean?"

Coran pursed his lips. "Difficult to say. He pushed himself farther than I would have thought possible; he may recover quickly, as well."

Matt rolled his eyes. "He's stubborn that way."

"It's more than mere stubbornness," Coran said.

Matt did turn then, searching Coran's face. "Red?"

"There's no denying that their fusion changed them both. It's possible Red's giving Akira stores of energy he never had before. He still pushed himself too far, but perhaps not by quite so extreme a margin as it seems."

Matt turned back to the battle, hoping Coran wouldn't see the truth reflected in Matt's eyes. He'd been flying with Akira up until yesterday, after all. He knew that Coran was right. Akira had been tired for some time, but it was only the last few battles that it had become true exhaustion. He should have stopped two or three days ago--but only days. The paladins' crash had come nearly two weeks ago now.

But it was an uncomfortable thought, that Akira might be more than merely human. Matt and Keith had acknowledged it in the privacy of the bond, but neither had spoken of it--not to each other, and not to the rest of the team.

Maybe they should have. Maybe, if they all survived today, they could fix that. Matt could only hope.

* * *

Dez had forgotten what it was like to watch Keena work. She'd always been a beast: never a secret she couldn't uncover, never a security system she couldn't circumvent. It had made her a phenomenal agent.

Now it made her a terrifying enemy.

On the surface, Dez had traded her post on the _Sentry_ for a cushier job. Personal guard to a Prince with no real command. It meant she spent a lot of time on the _Emperor's Pride_ , mingling with other Princes and their lieutenants and guards. There was a lot of potential for intel here, but most of it never went anywhere. Keena kept her own schedule, which left Dez with little time to do her own digging.

Still, she picked up bits and pieces just by trailing Keena around the ship, watching her spar with other Princes, listening to the gossip that flitted among the onlookers of these bouts. They sat in on strategy sessions occasionally--nothing to do with the paladins,but at least she might learn _something_ of use. Maybe if Keena succeeded in whatever contest of wills she was having with Haggar, they would finally start to get somewhere.

When change came, however, it wasn't in the direction Dez had expected.

"You're _leaving_?" Dez asked, unable to keep the surprise from her voice. "After all the trouble you went to to get yourself a position here?"

Keena waved her off, slipping a palm-sized tablet and a few portable scanners into a small bag that contained a few changes of clothes and little else. "Oh, don't be such a worry-wart. I'm only going to be gone for a few days, and I'll have you here to make sure no one tries to muscle me out while I'm away. You can handle that much, can't you?"

Dez clenched her jaw. She knew Keena's words were meant as barbs--she didn't seriously doubt Dez's capabilities, or she wouldn't be going in the first place. She just wanted Dez defensive. Wounded pride made for excellent misdirection.

"Where are you even going?" Dez asked, rather than rise to the bait.

Keena flashed a smile as she slung her bag over her shoulder. "Afraid I can't say. Top secret and all that. Don't worry; I just want to see what sorts of leverage we have at our disposal. Once I'm satisfied, I'll be back, and we'll be right back to infiltrating the boys' club of Zarkon's inner circle. Sound good?"

She blew an exaggerated kiss Dez's way, then swept out of the room. Dez chased after her, but once Keena had decided on secrecy, it was nigh impossible to get a peep out of her. Whatever she was doing now, she didn't want it known--not even to Dez.

It was bad news, whatever it was, and Dez's stomach roiled as she watched Keena board a tiny, unmarked shuttle.

Sooner or later, Keena's schemes would come to light, and Dez would pass them along to the paladins.

She just hoped it wouldn't be too late.

* * *

"I'm told you come in peace."

Kyrien was large for an Alayu, with the same opalescent skin as Narisa, but without her willowy build. They were taller than Thace and broader--not the bulk of a warrior or the girth of opulence, but something harder to define. They didn't have defined muscles, but Karen suspected that was an Alayu trait. Every line of their body was soft and rounded, as though to imitate subservience.

She didn't for one second think she could take them in a fight. She suspected even Thace would struggle, though if all went well none of them would ever find out for sure.

"That's true," Karen said with a slight incline of her head. She stood straight, refusing to be cowed, and showed Kyrien only a little more respect than she'd showed the guards at the door. They were important, certainly; likely the leader of this base--but this base wasn't as large as Kyrien wanted them to think. Their office, or war room, or whatever this place was, was barely two hundred feet from the suite where Karen, Thace, and Evri had spent the last few days.

Office, war room, and occasionally living quarters, actually. The only light was in the center of the room, over the table surrounded by a dozen chairs--four of which showed significantly more wear than the rest--with inset holographic projectors, currently turned off. Kyrien and their command team probably did most of their planning here, but the desk in the corner was too large to miss, and too cluttered to be a spare they'd shoved in here to keep out of the way. Kyrien did all their work here, and kept a cot tucked away in the darkest corner for nights when they couldn't spare more than a short nap, or for days when they needed to be ready for a call that might come at any moment.

They were short-handed here. (As were all rebellions, likely. Heavens knew the paladins never had enough hands to do everything that needed to be done.) Karen hoped it meant Kyrien would be willing to take a few risks for the promise of help.

She also hoped they had some way to get in touch with however many rebels were scattered around the rest of the galaxy, and to persuade them to join the fight. Karen didn't need anyone to tell her that they'd found just one outpost of a larger rebellion. Maybe an important one, maybe not. Certainly no one here could speak for the rebellion as a whole.

But it would be a step in the right direction.

"We come as representatives of the Voltron Coalition," Karen said. For all she'd spent the last few days writing scripts for this very moment, she discarded them all now. Oh, scraps of them still floated at the edges of her mind, ready for her to grasp. It was how she'd always run her court cases--practice a hundred variations of the same argument, script it in every possible arrangement, but then take only a bare sketch of the structure of the case to the courtroom, and leave herself space to read the room.

Kyrien sat back in their chair, though they gave no motion for Karen and the others to do the same. Narisa lingered by the door with the guards, her eyes pricking the back of Karen's head, her silence adding to the expectation filling the air.

"We have heard of your coalition," Kyrien said. "A fledgling alliance who thinks it can stand against the Empire's might."

"We've built that alliance by driving the Empire back," Karen said. "We aren't ignorant of the fight we've picked; we know it will be difficult. We know we can't bring the Empire down as we are now. But we believe that, with the help of you and your friends, we can drive the Empire out of the Greater Chettok, as we've driven it out of dozens of systems already."

"So you claim." Kyrien tapped their finger on the table twice. "Voltron has done amazing things, it's true. Yet you are not paladins."

"No." Karen spread her hands. "It's true, I'm not one of the paladins. They are needed on the front lines. I've already told Narisa this, and I'm sure she's passed it along, but my children are among the paladins. If you've seen images of them, then surely you see the resemblance."

Kyrien's eyes darted to Thace. "The Empire may have found a lookalike. Or _made_  one. Everyone knows Zarkon's witch can twist reality to her will."

"To what end, though? We've made no move against your people; we've brought only local communication devices and only enough weapons to defend ourselves." Karen shook her head and didn't stop long enough for Kyrien to respond. "The paladins themselves will verify our claims. By all means, call them, put them to the test. We came to offer help as much as to ask for it. You know the Empire's strongholds in this galaxy; you know where to strike to weaken their grip and to drive them out. Point us in the right direction, and we'll lead the charge. All we ask is that you fight by our side--first to drive the Empire out of your homes, and then to dismantle the Empire piece by piece."

Kyrien looked unconvinced, their gaze still stuck on Thace. Karen refused to defend his presence. If Kyrien wanted to make an issue of it, Karen would respond, but it would set a dangerous precedent to act as though every Galra in the Coalition was suspect. To apologize for their existence and justify their presence.

Or maybe it made her look like a fool, easily duped, not even shrewd enough to question whether Zarkon had spies inside her own team. Karen couldn't be sure. But whether this was the savvy choice or not, she knew it was the right one. Thace was a friend, and she would not act as though that was anything less than the blatant truth.

"What do you want, Kyrien?" Karen asked, once it became apparent that they weren't going to speak first. "Surely there must be something. A base with defenses you've never been able to penetrate, a prison full of important prisoners." Kyrien couldn't stop the way their eyes sharpened at the mention of a prison, and Karen smothered a smile. She leaned forward, resting her hands on the table. "Somewhere, in some form, Zarkon has leverage over you and your friends. Let us remove that obstacle for you. Then we can speak about the long term."

She waited, unflinching, staring into Kyrien's unfathomable black eyes.

At length, they leaned back in their chair, feigning disinterest. "I suppose there is something you could help us with. We've lost too many men to desperate strikes already; eventually we had to make the call to stop trying. But if you're volunteering to shoulder whatever losses you may take..."

"Give us whatever information you have, and give us a secure way to contact the paladins," Karen said. "We'll handle the rest."


	35. Ingav Prison (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The war rages on, the paladins and their allies holding the line but battling exhaustion every step of the way. Keena's ploy to gain Zarkon's trust--giving up the Accords--has left them blind, but they still have one person on the inside: Dez, ironically protected by Keena herself, as Keena trusts Dez enough to be her lieutenant. Meanwhile, Karen, Thace, and Evri have made contact with the rebellion, offering to take on a mission as proof of their intentions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Mild unreality and disorientation (additional information in the notes at the end of the chapter.)

Ingav Prison.

It was a deceptively mundane name for what it was. Nearly three thousand prisoners--the most the paladins had ever tried to liberate at once, and all of them linked to the rebellion in one way or another. Pidge ran through the sparse information they'd received from their mother, courtesy of what was, by all accounts, a minor rebel operation in a major port city.

"Can I just say that I hate that we're doing this blind?" Hunk said in a small voice.

"We're not going in _totally_ blind," Pidge said. They paused, nose wrinkling as they stared at the image on their viewscreen: the prison in the distance, enlarged and marked up with data from the scanners. They didn't have a lot of intel, but what they had seemed to be solid. "There's a _lot_  of people in there."

"A lot of people means a lot of security," Lance pointed out. "A lot of security we know next to nothing about."

Wasn't that the truth. The team had done enough jailbreaks by now to know what baseline to expect. Perimeter alarms, live patrols in addition to sentries, a manned security booth--more than one in a prison this size--and locks on damn near every door. What they _didn't_  know was what else Ingav had in place to handle a population of thousands of hostile ex-combatants. How many of these prisoners were trained soldiers?

Matt seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "On the bright side, if we can just get the cell doors open, we should have no problem overwhelming the guards."

"Assuming the prisoners are in a shape to be fighting," Shiro said. "We've never seen a prison this large; for all we know, the guards keep the prisoners on the verge of starvation to keep them subdued."

Nyma grunted. "Why keep them alive at all? That's what I want to know."

"Maybe they have information Zarkon wants," Hunk said. "There's still an active rebellion in the area, and these people probably know something about it."

Keith frowned. "So keep the leaders alive. The Empire's running short on Quintessence as it is; why keep a station like this up and running, eating up however much power it takes to keep three thousand people alive? And on top of that, they need to staff it with enough guards to keep the prisoners from just taking over..." He shook his head. "Something about this doesn't feel right."

Pidge had another thought about what might be going on in there that might make a horde of random prisoners more valuable to the Empire, but they weren't going to be the one to say it out loud. Odds were this wasn't a research facility, anyway. Those tended to be smaller--a few dozen test subjects at once, not this circus. And Pidge hadn't caught wind of anything big enough to warrant this sort of investment.

They supposed they'd find out sooner or later.

They scoped it out for a few minutes longer, gathering what information they could. The rebels Karen and Thace had made contact with only knew that a large number of combatants captured in the last big skirmish thirty years ago had been taken to Ingav, scattered numbers joining them since. No one had ever escaped Ingav, though apparently the prisoners included some of the best rebel agents in living memory, people who had infiltrated Imperial strongholds, taken down massive forces, broken out of every other prison they were tossed into.

Valuable prisoners, and quite a few figureheads that warranted a rescue for morale, if nothing else. Unsurprisingly, the rebellion had mounted a whole string of attempted jailbreaks, every one of them a resounding failure. Thace had summarized the plans as best the local understood them, and every plan seemed solid enough to Pidge.

Okay, maybe not the frontal assault, but the rest of it? They'd tried sneaking in, they'd tried planting a friend among the guards. They'd sent their people in with guns, with explosives, with every clever weapon and gadget they could come up with, concealed in ways that should have been able to thwart any search.

Not a single operative who'd left on one of these missions had made it home.

The most recent rescue attempt was six months in the past, and the prison's population had grown another two hundred since. Ingav had started life as the largest Imperial prison in the Greater Chettok; now, it might as well be the _only_  one. Zarkon was consolidating prisoners, and it showed. The station had started as an impressive structure, with the typical Imperial spikes and bristling defenses. Half a dozen expansions gave it a more bulbous appearance, the defenses somewhat haphazard.

The external defenses could afford to be a little haphazard, if whatever awaited inside was as good as it seemed.

There was little more they could learn that Thace and Karen hadn't already passed along. The bio-signatures were too dense to pick out much of anything, except that the prison was every bit as crowded as advertised. They mapped the external defenses and plotted their course through, and then there was nothing left to do except move in.

They'd brought all the Lions, wanting them close in case, as seemed likely, things went south and they needed to fight their way out. Seeing as that would mean the death of the twenty eight hundred or so prisoners who _couldn't_  fit inside the lions' cockpits and cargo holds, it was an outcome they were trying to avoid, but they were taking no chances. Shiro had even tried to convince Akira to stay with the Red Lion to ensure it would be able to join in the rescue in a pinch.

 _It'll be close enough,_ was all Akira had said, blatantly ignoring the fact that the Red Lion didn't work from the opposite side of the castle as him, never mind beyond the prison's secure perimeter. Akira was adamant, though, and no one knew how his thing with Red worked well enough to argue him down.

So they were all going, piling into Green for the final approach. As the smallest Lion, with the strongest cloak, she was the least likely to be spotted approaching, and would retreat to wait with the others once the paladins were inside.

Expectant silence filled the cockpit as Pidge brought them in, only Val's steady presence in their mind easing the tension. They'd chosen to enter through one of the hangars that ringed the prison's central structure, hoping a faulty door would attract less attention than a hole in a wall and a sudden depressurization.

The hangar was blessedly empty when Pidge overrode the last fail-safe and forced the door open just far enough for the paladins and Akira to slip inside, using the jets in their armor to guide them through. They dispersed around the edges of the room, settling into the shadows and bracing for a fight. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that, but they were pragmatists, in the end.

Seconds ticked by, and no one came to investigate the hangar. Was it possible the impenetrable Ingav was used to quirky machinery? Had they checked their proximity sensors and declared it good enough, not worth checking out?

If anything, it suggested that the people in charge of security at this prison considered their interior defenses so competent that they weren't worried about someone sneaking in.

It wasn't a comfortable thought.

They waited a full five minutes before Keith headed for the door, a mix of exasperated and grateful paladins close behind. None of them liked waiting, not even the ones who thought it was too soon to tip their hand.

But Keith was already at the door, and he disappeared through it by the time Pidge caught up. They paused, checking their scanners for signs of approaching guards, then followed after Keith.

They had just long enough to register him standing there, frozen in the middle of the hallway and staring at something away down the corridor, before the hangar behind them exploded.

* * *

Karen, Thace, and Evri existed in a kind of limbo at the rebel hideout on Alayun. They weren't prisoners, but they weren't exactly allies, either. Kyrien had forbidden them to leave the building, but they were allowed most places within it, and if Narisa followed them everywhere they went, it seemed to be as much for their benefit as anything.

There were other people here, but Karen saw them only in passing, dirty looks tossed over shoulders as rooms cleared out. Clearly, no one trusted them; Karen couldn't blame them. Talking with Narisa had given her a certain amount of insight into life in the Greater Chettok. News of Voltron's return had penetrated the Imperial stranglehold on communication, but details were sparse, and exaggerated if they came anywhere near the truth at all.

These people were smart enough to recognize a myth in the making, so they took it all with a grain of salt. Likely they'd never expected Voltron or any of its allies to come to them, which left them uncertain how to respond.

More than that, Thace's presence made them uncomfortable. Kyrien had more or less declared a truce, but everyone here knew a Galra when they saw one, and they all had personal grudges that, unfortunately, they seemed inclined to take out on Thace. It hadn't come to violence--yet--but a cold shoulder and a hasty exit was one of the kinder receptions he’d received.

The paladins would be starting the infiltration at Ingav soon, if they hadn't already. With luck, they would all have their answers in a few hours, and Karen hoped a successful rescue would not only ease tensions here in the base, but open a line of communication to even more powerful people in the resistance.

For now, though, there wasn't anything to do but wait. It had been a little less than a day since Karen had convinced Kyrien to let her contact the castle-ship on a line specifically guarded against Imperial counter-espionage efforts. She'd been able to see her children, talk to them briefly, and now she was here. Eating moderately tasty food in an empty cafeteria while the universe turned without her.

Evri was the first to push her plate away. Unsurprising. She'd had very little appetite since Tosk's death and seemed to be running mostly on spite and routine. Both were running out.

Karen finished her meal quickly, eating by rote. Her own appetite was finnicky at best, and the reminder of Evri's grief had sapped the last of it, but she ate to tide herself over until dinner. Thace finished just as Karen did, and Narisa shoveled down the last of her meal. They all stood as though directed by some invisible signal and headed as one back toward their small suite of rooms.

A disturbance in the hall drew Karen's attention halfway back, and she slowed, her eyes tracking a crowd spilling out of the comms deck where Karen had contacted the castle. Thace stopped beside her, and it took only a moment for Narisa and Evri to realize that they'd lost their companions.

"What's happening?" Karen asked. A frantic murmuring hovered over the crowd, news from within filtering out to the newcomers pressing in around the edges, but there were too many people talking over one another for Karen to distinguish one voice from another.

Narisa frowned. "Someone must have gotten word from one of the other outposts. Long-distance communication is dangerous, even with our security. We don't risk it unless it's important."

A growing pit of dread sat in Karen's stomach as she struck out toward the crowd, the absence of knowledge pulsing like a headache. This wasn't something Green, or any of the Lions, could possibly have insight into, but that didn't stop her from expecting the knowledge to filter into her mind like the magic she'd grown so accustomed to.

Instead, she acquired her information in a more mundane manner: by eavesdropping on the rebels' conversations.

"Ilvara Chrem."

"How'd they find it?"

"We have to help!"

A gasp alerted Karen to Narisa's presence at her shoulder. Her eyes had gone wide, her hands clapped over her mouth. "What?" Karen demanded. "What is it?"

"Ilvara Chrem," Narisa whispered. "That's another outpost in the region. I'm not sure where, exactly, but I know we coordinated with them a few years ago. Back when we still did big jobs."

"It's been attacked," Karen said, piecing together the whispers around her. A few of the closest people turned and noticed them there. Several shied away from Thace, who towered over most of the group. The rest were too busy clamoring for more details. "Kyrien will send help, I assume?"

Narisa shook her head. "We don't have the manpower for that. Maybe a few years ago, but we're losing people faster than we can vet them. We can barely protect ourselves."

Without a word, Thace brushed past them, weaving through the crowd and leaving a startled vacuum in his wake. Karen gave chase before the rebels could recover and close the gap. They found Kyrien at the center of the throng, leaning over a comms tech's chair and conversing with him in hushed tones.

"Commander Kyrien," Thace called. Kyrien didn't have a title, so far as Karen knew, but they seemed to appreciate the ego-stroking even if it _did_  come from a Galra. They glanced at Thace, breaking off whatever they'd been saying to the tech. Thace sketched a shallow bow as he continued. "I hear one of your sister outposts has been compromised."

Kyrien closed their eyes. "Unfortunately, yes. They're under siege--holding out for now, but we all know the Empire wins in an extended contest."

"You can't spare anyone to help." Thace held up his hand as Kyrien began to bluster. "It's not a question. I haven't been here long, but I know how these things go. You can hold ground, but you can rarely retake it. Except today."

"What makes today any different?" Kyrien asked.

Thace waited in silence until they looked up and met his eye. "Today you have me. Give me a ship, or let me return to the port to try to reclaim mine, and give me the coordinates for this base, if you have them."

Some of the nearest rebels began to murmur, suspicion darkening their eyes. If they hadn't trusted Thace before, this certainly wasn't helping.

Karen shouldered her way into the conversation, her chin held high. "You have nothing to lose here, Kyrien," she said, though she raised her voice enough to make it clear her words weren't for Kyrien alone. "Ilvara Chrem is already compromised, so whether or not you trust us to help, we can't possibly do any more harm than the Empire is already doing. If we fail, you lose nothing, and if we succeed, your allies live to fight another day."

Thace was scowling at her, probably irritated at her for tying them together in this. She was sure he'd intended to go it alone, though she couldn't decide if he had some of Keith's cockiness, buried deep down under the spy's composure, and thought he could _actually_ break the siege alone--or whether he was hoping a noble sacrifice would bolster this fledgling alliance. Or perhaps he just thought removing himself from the equation was in the Coalition's best interest.

Whatever the case, Karen' refused to let him get away with it.

Kyrien stared at them, conversation stalled in the air around them. In the end, desperation won out, and Kyrien agreed to let them go. Evri, of course, came with them--but surprisingly, Narisa did, too. "None of you know how to fly our ships," she said, though it was a flimsy excuse. She knew her people didn't have the resources to spare for a rescue mission, but that didn't mean she didn't want to try anyway.

Thace grabbed Karen's arm as they boarded Narisa's ship, coordinates for Ilvara Chrem already loaded in the computer. "You don't need to come," he said.

"I volunteered for this mission, same as you," she shot back.

He shook his head. "This isn't the mission you signed up for. There's going to be heavy combat at Ilvara Chrem. You could _die_."

"I'm aware of the risks--"

"I don't think you are." He closed his eyes, relaxing his grip on her arm. "You've come a long way since you and I started training together, Karen, but you aren't ready for something like this."

"Were my kids?" she asked. "Were _any_  of us? Zarkon doesn't wait for us to be ready, Thace. We just have to survive as best we can.”

* * *

When Lance's vision cleared, he was alone in a darkened corridor, lying in a heap on the floor, his head pounding. He picked himself up, glancing at the twisted hole in the ceiling above him. The beam of his headlamp cut up through multiple floors, their jagged edges bleeding together. Twisted metal formed a giant's ladder up the cavity, and Lance likely could have scaled it if he wanted to.

He just wasn't sure how sturdy any of it was. It'd be just his luck to climb three or four floors up, only to hit a loose cross-beam and come plummeting back down. His bones ached just _thinking_  of it.

"Hello?" he called, eyes flicking to the readout on his visor. His comms still seemed to be in working order, but there was no answer.

Atmospheric readings were normal, too, somehow. Either the explosion hadn't come from the hangar like he'd thought, or Ingav Prison was equipped with a ridiculous number of failsafe airlocks. Either way, the air was breathable, so Lance unsealed his helmet and called again. "Guys? Anyone there?"

Still no answer. Lance's heart drummed in his chest as he flashed his headlamp up through the shaft. If it was as dark up there as it was down here, the flickering light should have drawn anyone's attention, even if the blast had scrambled their hearing.

He told himself that was what it was. His own ears were ringing a little bit, too, now that he thought of it. The explosion had left him scrambled and the others, wherever they had landed, were probably in a similar state. Maybe they'd already woken up, for that matter, continued on into the prison to complete the mission.

Without checking on the rest of the team? That didn't make any sense. But it was better than the alternative--that they were all dead, or badly wounded, and Lance was the only one in any position to find the rest of them.

That didn't make sense, either. Lance had been in the middle of the group, less than two feet from Val. Not leading the charge, but not guarding their backs, either. Whichever direction the blast had come from, someone should have taken less of it than Lance, and Val should have landed nearby.

But no one was here, and no one was answering. He thought he'd have heard it, even through the ringing. He definitely would have seen another beam of light in the dark cavity he'd fallen through.

Where _was_ he, anyway? The corridor was dark and quiet, lined with unmarked doors. The nearest didn't open at a touch--he didn't think it had power--but when he wedged the tip of his bayard into the crack, he was able to lever it open without much fuss. The room beyond was as dark and empty as everything else. A cell, yes, with a narrow bunk, a toilet in the corner, and stains on the floor, but no prisoner inside.

A chill ran up his spine, and he spun back toward the corridor behind him, bayard lighting the space up for an instant as it activated. He scanned the darkness, darkening his headlamp and letting his visor switch to an infrared display. He saw nothing. No prisoners, no paladins, no guards.

It was like this place was deserted. But... why? _How?_  They'd seen the Quintessence readings from the other end of the solar system. There should have been _thousands_ of people here.

The door behind him slammed shut, clipping his heel as it did so, and Lance yelped, spinning again.

The door was still dark and powerless, but this time he couldn't force it open no matter how much he shoved.

Backing away from the empty cell, Lance tried the comms once more. "Guys? If anyone can hear me, please say something. I'm seriously starting to get creeped out. It's like this place is--"

He stopped himself from saying it out loud, like the word might make it real. His spine tingled with imagined eyes, watchful spirits, vengeful ghosts. He'd never seen a ghost, on Earth or anywhere in space, but that didn't mean they didn't exist. If the Alteans could take an imprint of a person's memories and hold it in Quintessence to give the AIs a semblance of life, wasn't it possible the same could happen naturally?

Maybe whatever the Empire had done to these prisoners was so awful it had left a stain in the very walls of this place.

Shivering, Lance returned to the cleft in the structure, and started climbing up. The others _had_  to be close, and Lance _very much_  did not want to be alone right now.

* * *

Hunk's chest felt too small as he crept down an empty corridor. His footsteps echoed in the air around him, too loud, too big, like a gigantic bell announcing his location to the guards. He kept expecting a troop of them to come marching around the corner, rifles up and primed to fire.

So far, they hadn't shown.

No one had.

The silence didn't make him feel any better.

The lights were bright here, almost blinding. He couldn't decide if he liked that better or worse than the darkness where he'd first awoken. Being able to see was a welcome change, but the lights stung his eyes, making his pounding headache almost unbearable, and the heat of them drenched him in sweat. His armor felt too-tight, the fabric of it clinging to his skin. He couldn't breathe.

A sound reached him from the distance, too faint to make out what it was. His own breathing nearly drowned it out, and the way it hung there in the air, audio filigree so delicate it seemed any motion might shatter it into pieces, emphasized the utter silence that blanketed the prison. There was no motion here. No breathing. No voices. Not even the hum of air in the vents or the buzz that usually dripped from Imperial lights.

Just.

Stillness.

It wasn't right. _Nothing_  about this place was right. He'd known it even before they entered; it was too easy to find, too big to be practical. It made no sense to hold so many prisoners in one place. Of _course_  it had all been a gigantic trap. Then had come the explosion, and the darkness, half the hallway buried in rubble and not a single one of his friends anywhere in sight. His comms were dead, or the others' were, or none of them were in a position to answer.

He wanted to rewind the day, start over from the beginning and voice the fears he'd tamped down on. He'd thought he was being irrational, but today, it was fully justified.

And now it was too late to change anything. He was alone, isolated in enemy territory, and he couldn't even say for certain that any of his friends were alive.

He kept walking, though, the bayard a comforting weight in his hand, his shield blazing bright and raised to catch any surprise attack the guards might try to launch. He marched down row after row of empty cells, some with their doors standing open, some with a window through which he could see the hollow darkness within. Some were closed, impenetrable, but the silence was so absolute he didn't need to open the doors to know there was no one on the other side.

 _None_ of this was _right._ This wasn't a prison; it was a trap. (A big, elaborate, _expensive_ trap, and for what? Sure, the paladins were here now, but Zarkon couldn't have predicted that, not when this place had been built _years_  before Voltron's return. And who else had he snared with this trap? A few dozen rebels? It didn't make _sense._ )

The sound came again, a whisper on the edge of hearing. There were no words to it, though Hunk's mind tried to supply them anyway. There was certainly _meaning_  to it. Emotion. There was a cadence to it, quick and questing, and a fearful tone that rose and fell in stuttering repetitions.

He realized suddenly what it was, and the air around him seemed to shimmer with the unheard music. A song-- _Shay's_  song. She was alive. She was _searching for him._

As though the realization had opened the dam, Shay's song flooded his mind, resounding inside him, as loud as though she were by his side. Her voice was so close he actually had to turn to make sure she wasn't behind him, but he was still alone. Still lost.

He closed his eyes and sang to her, his attempt at comfort hamstrung by his own anxiety. Shay's relief was palpable, her song faltering for a moment before resuming more measured than before. He sized her up, and she did the same, and Hunk was both concerned and relieved to find her in much the same state as him: not injured, but alone and unable to contact the others. The base must be scrambling their comms somehow.

At least they had the song, which meant that Hunk had Shay.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and he turned again. The hallway was still as empty as ever, but it didn't feel it. A camera hung on the ceiling behind him, a dark spot, slightly bulging.

Someone was watching him through that lens. He knew it, though he didn't know how. There was a malignancy to that small, dark blotch that wasn't present anywhere else in this prison. This hallway was deserted, but the prison wasn't wholly abandoned.

Hunk tore his gaze away from the camera and continued on, still singing to Shay. Maybe they could follow the song to each other. Hunk would feel better with her at his back. And once they'd found each other, they would figure out where to go from there--after the others, or after the person watching them from some dark booth a safe distance away.

Ingav Prison existed for a reason; Hunk needed to find out what that was.

* * *

The attack came sooner than Coran had hoped, but not sooner than he'd expected. Imperial fleets had been showing up every day, sometimes twice a day, with fewer than twenty hours between most of the attacks.

It had been two hours now since the paladins had left, and sixteen since the end of the last battle. When Karen's call had come in with word of Ingav Prison and the potential for an alliance with the rebellion, Shiro and Allura had called everyone together for a planning session, and then they'd insisted on the entire team getting a few hours of sleep before the mission began. As poorly as they'd all been sleeping these past few weeks, it was a wise call, even if it did leave the fleet vulnerable.

They'd all known they'd have to face at least one battle without the paladins, and it seemed that time had arrived.

"I've got activity on the long-range sensors," Renna called from her station on the right arm of the crew ring. "Two wormholes. I see three warships so far."

Coran was already calling up the images, even as he put out the alert to the rest of the fleet. "Just three?" Coran laughed, though it felt forced. "We can take that easily."

"Let's just hope it _stays_  that way," Eli muttered. He, Lana, and Akani had insisted on joining Coran on the bridge--primarily so that they would be there the moment Coran got word back from the paladins of what they all hoped was a successful jailbreak. The prospect of battle didn't deter them, and Eli and Lana had even taken up the drone controls at two of the paladin stations.

Coran pressed his lips together as he relayed information to Coalition command. They technically outranked him, and could issue him orders, but in reality, Coran had more battle experience than many of them, and more recent than them all. He'd become an unofficial member of the central command, conferring on all their plans. Once the battle got going, and Coran had to focus on his own crew, they would issue orders without him, but for now they waited for his recommendation.

"Hit hard and fast," he said. "Keep them on the defensive, and try to divide their attention. The longer we can keep them from realizing the Lions aren't here, the better off we'll be."

Admiral Ellix gestured to someone off-screen. "You and Anamuri will have to deal with those warships, you realize."

Coran gave a tight smile. "Nothing we haven't done before, I assure you."

Ellix nodded once. "Then I'll leave you to it."

They cut the call, and Coran barked out orders, getting the weapons online and pointed at the enemy. They opened fire as soon as they were ready, rocking the foremost warship as Guard fighters began to spill from the hangars. The _Hope of Kera_  added her firepower to the castle's, and more ships pooled in the darkness, coming from all sides. They met in the middle, bursts of laserfire like tiny sparks dancing across Coran's view.

Battle always looked so strange from this distance, everything so small and quiet it was easy to forget people were dying out there.

"Keep firing on those warships," Coran ordered. "Scanners, watch for weaknesses, and concentrate your fire there. The sooner we can bring down their shields, the better."

His crew called out an acknowledgment, and Coran left them to it, igniting a new screen and opening a call. "How's it going, paladins?"

He spoke distractedly, his mind more on his own battle than the paladins'. They'd wanted him to keep them updated on anything that happened while they were away, so even if Coran had no qualms about the fleet's ability to handle three isolated warships, he was going to tell them.

...Except no one answered.

Frowning, Coran tore his eyes away from the viewscreen and stared at the comms window. "Paladins, come in. Can you hear me?"

Still no answer. He felt the Kahales' eyes on him but turned first to Renna. "Analyze the outgoing call from my station," he said. "I think something's blocking the signal."

"No, sir," Renna said almost at once. "Communication established sixteen ticks ago. Signal strength at ninety-four percent."

Coran frowned. "And we're receiving communication back from the paladins' devices?"

"Yes, sir."

Unease sat like a stone in Coran's stomach. What did it mean? Interference on the line, some kind of comms block around the prison--that would have made sense. Coran wouldn't be happy with it, with not knowing what was happening, but the paladins could handle this.

But this... If the comms were working, but the paladins weren't answering, there were only a few explanations he could think of, none of them pleasant. Either the paladins' armor, and the comms contained within, had been taken from them, or the paladins themselves were in no condition to respond.

"What do we do?" Akani asked, her soft voice almost lost in the murmur of voices all around.

Coran turned toward her, scrambling to mask how lost he felt. "We wait," he said. "And we trust the paladins to be able to get themselves out of any trouble they found."

His voice sounded more confident than he felt, but he kept his chin up, holding Akani's eyes. She needed someone to be strong over this, and not to panic. So even if Coran was already spinning plans for a daring rescue--an utterly impractical rescue, at that--he let none of it show on his face.

He could do nothing until this battle was won. If the paladins hadn't responded by then...

Well, then he was probably going to do something stupid, and he wouldn't think twice about doing it.

* * *

Shiro wandered the empty halls of Ingav Prison, scowling as he poked his head into another empty room. He'd passed beyond the cells for now, cutting through a reinforced door and exiting into slightly nicer quarters beyond. This must have been where the guards lived, at least a portion of them. There were small, sparse bunks, a small kitchen and dining hall. A training room or arena of some sort, though Shiro wasn't sure if it was the guards who fought here or the prisoners. He didn't stay long enough to find evidence either way.

Someone must have realized they were coming.

They knew they were taking a risk, coming here. The only way to get here without spending a month on travel was by wormhole, and everything they knew about Chettok said the Empire was watching for unauthorized wormholes.

They'd taken what precautions they could, wormholing in at a distance, closer to another base, sending a pair of scouts out to be seen in the area. The Lions were fast, and it had taken less than an hour to get to Ingav, which shouldn't have been long enough to empty out so much of the base so thoroughly, not to mention spoof the BLIP-tech readout and set explosives near every likely entry point.

It all felt too convenient. It reminded him of when Keturah's AI had been spying on them, honestly. Like the Empire was always two steps ahead, always prepared for whatever the paladins tried, in possession of detailed and specific knowledge.

There couldn't be another spy. Not with as careful as they'd been with this plan. Only the paladins, their adjuncts, and Karen's team on Alayun knew about this mission. They'd spoken with Karen on a secure line, and made their plans in one of the highest security conference rooms on the castle. If there was a spy, they had to be embedded in the rebellion itself, in which case they couldn't have provided any details of the paladins' plans.

He still couldn't shake the feeling that the castle-ship had been compromised once more. It itched beneath his skin, prickled down his spine. He kept his eyes open, constantly scanning for signs that he had company. The Empire wouldn't have gone through all this trouble to separate the paladins if they weren't going to capitalize on it.

Maybe he should try to get to an exterior wall. He could call Black to him, and they could try to find Allura. Once the two of them were together in Black's cockpit, finding the rest of the team, guiding them back to one another if needed, would be simple.

The floor beneath Shiro's feet tilted on an angle, and he stopped walking, his vision going grainy as a hum built in his ears. He thought, for a horrifying moment, that this was some delayed effect of the earlier explosion, but it cleared quickly, and the presence that remained was too familiar to mistake.

_Sam._

_Something's changed, Shiro._

All thoughts of a spy on the castle-ship, of the trap that had been waiting for them here at Ingav, fell away at the way Sam's voice shook. _What do you mean?_ Shiro asked. _What's happened?_

_There's someone new in the lab. Not a druid, but not a tech, either. I don't know why she's here, but I don't like it. Even the druids defer to her._

_It's not Keturah--Haggar--is it?_

Allura's voice startled Shiro, though he knew it shouldn't have. If there was a way for Sam to contact only one of them at a time, he hadn't figure it out yet, so every time he reached out, it linked all three of them together. Shiro itched to ask Allura where she was, whether she'd seen any of the others, or any signs of the prisoners and guards they'd expected to find, but Sam's problems outweighed the impulse.

 _No,_ Sam said. _I've seen Haggar; she's been here before. This is someone new... She called herself Keena._

* * *

"Interesting," Myrin said, pulling out of the illusion long enough to make a few notes on his screen. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Doubtless no one has," said Skerax. She had been tasked with monitoring this intake, and she sat removed from the rest of them, surrounded by screens that showed security feeds from across the prison. "Paladin magic has always centered around bonds."

"Yes, but this is a bond with someone outside their ranks. _Direct communication_  with someone--" Myrin cut off, plunging halfway back into the trance that linked him to his fellow druids and to the paladins ensnared in their spell. "Do we know who that third voice is? He's not close enough for me to touch his mind directly."

"The Champion called him Sam." Skerax swiveled her chair, igniting a new monitor to the right of the current arc. "I will see what I can find, but for the time being, he is of no concern to us."

"What if he helps the black paladins break free of the illusion?"

A smile tugged at Skerax's lips, and she glanced at the screen that showed the paladins ranged around the hangar where they'd entered the prison. Most had dropped to their knees when the illusion took root; a few lay sprawled on the floor, their eyes twitching beneath their lids. "I'd like to see them try."

As Myrin watched, Orrak, the head of security for Ingav, stepped into frame, two of his guards trailing behind him. He stepped over sprawling limbs and rigid figures, scanning faces with the camera embedded in his gauntlet. Each face in turn appeared on Skerax's screen.

"There," she said, when he came to the figure in strange armor. All the others wore paladin armor, identical except for the color of the accents. The twelfth member of the group, in contrast, wore a black suit of a slimmer design with only a few orange accents and none of the white. Skerax slid his image to another screen, comparing it to the one they'd been sent upon reporting the paladins’ intrusion. "That's him. A living Lion..."

Orrak drew his pistol and leveled it at the Lion's head. "You want me to kill him?"

Skerax shook her head. "Bring him back here. We'll want to get Lady Haggar's confirmation first. No sense losing a test subject to save a few moments."

On the screen, Orrak gestured to his guards, who stepped foward and grabbed the Lion by the arms, dragging him away from the rest of the group. Skerax caught Myrin watching and scowled. "Get back to work. Until the paladins are fully enmeshed in the prison, I don't want us taking any chances."

Mryin put his back to Skerax before wrinkling his nose in disgust. She wouldn't be able to see it through his mask, but she always seemed to know, anyway. She was always so stuffy, so gruff, snapping at them for any minor breach. It was like she thought the illusions of Ingav might actually fall, and the prisoners somehow escape their own minds.

Thirty years they'd been doing this, and they hadn't had a single escape, or even a credible attempt. He didn't care who the paladins were; they weren't going to change Ingav's record.

* * *

Akira stood stock still in the middle of a vestibule at the heart of yet another cell block. It reminded him a little bit of photos he'd seen of Alcatraz, only many times bigger. Long rows of empty cells surrounded him, metal bars stretching out into the distance. A rickety spiral stair in the center of the room and glass-enclosed elevators at either end would carry him up to the next floor, and the next beyond that, each identical to the ground floor except that they had a narrow catwalk ringing the vestibule.

The overhangs stretched on above him, five visible before the darkness swallowed them. When Akira pointed his light up, he could see more, but the beam never found a ceiling.

Somewhere, something groaned--metal settling in its fittings or someone trying to sneak up on him, or maybe just the inner workings of a massive prison complex. It was a hollow sound, and it rang in the air for long moments before it faded away. It should have been unnerving.

Instead, Akira only frowned, turning another slow circle.

Red was wide awake within him, bristling and on-edge. Her growls rang in his ears, more real than the pop and groans of the metal around him.

Keith and Matt were close.

They weren't, not according to his eyes, or his ears, or the arm he swept through the empty air around him. By all accounts, he was alone here... And yet, he knew he wasn't.

If he closed his eyes, he felt certain that he could have reached out an arm and found Keith and Matt both by touch. It made no sense--but Red was adamant that they were here, her frustration mounting inside him, her mind a cornered animal pacing inside his rib cage. They _were_  here.

He opened his eyes, and the prison around him seemed somehow distorted, like a dream, or a scene viewed through a funhouse mirror. Every bar was meticulously placed, the cells exactly what he expected from an impenetrable fortress of a prison.

Perhaps _too_  much like he expected. He was human, and had lived his whole life on Earth up until a year and a half ago. This was the _Empire_ , an ancient and technologically advanced race of aliens. He'd _seen_  their prisons before, and they looked very little like anything found on Earth.

 _What, you think this is all some sort of hallucination?_ he asked himself. Even just thinking it, he felt himself flush. It was an absurd idea, and he nearly dismissed it at once.

Nearly, except that Red roared suddenly, thrusting herself between Akira and his body like a layer of cellophane. Akira's breath caught, panic singing in his ears. He clawed at her, tried to force her back. She'd promised she wouldn't do this again, wouldn't force him under like she had when they'd first returned from Oriande. He didn't want to go under again.

Seconds passed, and Red held onto the position she'd taken, forcing him a step back from reality, everything floating around him, distant and just a little hazy. She didn't push him any further than that. If anything, she seemed to be holding onto him, a frantic, anguished purr thrumming in his chest. He closed his eyes, breathed--all of it meaningless when he was disconnected from his body, but the effort calmed him just the same.

 _ **Look,**_  she told him, and Akira did.

The prison, already warped from Akira's surreal perspective on it, seemed to shift further, shadows lengthening, cells rearranging themselves. The darkness overhead collapsed; the barred cells became steel and something like plexiglass. It was more sterile than what Akira had seen before, more alien.

 _It_ is  _an illusion,_  he realized. _It's showing us what we expect to see._

Meanwhile Matt and Keith's presences burned bright and strong, completely unaffected by the illusion.

They were moving away.

Akira turned before he had time to remember that he couldn't, and he slipped seamlessly back into his body as Red yielded control. The prison opened up once more, iron bars sprouting from the ground, a hole carving itself in the ceiling. It was an imperfect illusion this time, bits of Red's version of the prison still mixed in, until it looked like something that had been hit by a bomb.

A bomb.

Had that been real, or had he been trapped in an illusion even then? He remembered the blast, and he remembered wandering the prison, but he couldn't remember what had happened in between, or why he'd been unable to find the others.

These were fleeting concerns, fading from his mind as he chased after Keith and Matt. It took him a few moments to realize that they were still getting further away. Once he did, he spun, starting back the other way, but it was no good. If this was an illusion, if he was trapped inside his head, then it didn't matter where he ran, or what he did. His physical body probably wasn't doing anything at all.

They were being separated. Akira was being taken somewhere, or Keith and Matt were, or all three of them were being moved, in different directions.

And he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

Red brushed up against his mind, beginning once more to slip between him and his body--or the illusion of it, at any rate. He resisted for a moment, then saw her plan. With a deep breath to steady himself, he let go, and Red plunged him into the Heart.

He was there for only an instant, the heat of the lava causing sweat to bead on his forehead and the memories beneath his feet making his vision go dark around the edges.

He blinked, and he was back in the physical realm, on the ground, his arms wrenched up and behind him at an awkward angle, his head pounding as lights flashed by overhead. His head lolled back, and he saw two figures in Imperial armor. They were dragging him somewhere, and they seemed not to realize he was awake.

His head spun, and he screwed his eyes shut, fighting down a wave of nausea. His body refused to listen to him, and all he could do was stare at the ceiling as it slipped by, dark splotches dancing across his eyes. The remnants of the illusion haunted the edges of his vision, a phantom Alcatraz lurking there, just out of sight, but Red cocooned him in a blaze of heat. She would keep the illusion at bay, but it would take nearly all her energy. It was up to Akira to get away before he found himself locked up, strapped down, or cut open.

He waited, breathed, let Red's fire fill his veins. Feeling slowly returned to his extremities, and the headache retreated to a dull pounding. He was only going to get one shot at this; he had to make it count.

Akira twisted, yanking his right arm free of the soldier's grip and grabbing the other with both hands. With a single heave, Akira dragged the man down, flipping over at the same time so he had his feet under him. He leaped, grabbing the first guard's rifle as he tried to bring it around.

A laser singed the air nearby, and Akira cursed. He smashed his helmet into the guard, stunning him long enough to wrench the rifle away, and shot him at point blank range.

The first guard struggled to his feet, hands going for his own rifle, and Akira shot him, too, then screamed as something white-hot bit into his shoulder. He staggered, squinting through the pain at the third man. He stood some distance away, rifle leveled at Akira. Too far to tackle him. But Akira couldn't be sure his injured arm could hold the rifle steady enough to take a shot.

He would have to risk it. If he did nothing, he was dead.

Akira breathed through his teeth, counting down the seconds inside his head. Then, he raised his rifle as the last guard did the same.

They fired at the same instant.

* * *

Meri knew by now what a druid's magic felt like. She'd felt that same power flowing through her veins. She'd had it digging around inside her mind.

It had been months since Keturah and her apprentices had trapped Meri inside an illusion, but she'd never forgotten what it felt like, and it took her mere moments to recognize this one for what it was--just about long enough for the druids' fake bomb to go off, offering their minds a convenient excuse for why they were suddenly isolated.

An irrational part of her brain kicked herself for not figuring it out a few moments earlier so she could have warned the others. But that was the illusion talking. The second the illusion slipped into place, it was too late for a warning, and as best Meri could tell, that had been the moment they set foot on this station.

After the blast, she'd "woken up" half-buried in a pile of rubble, pinned and bleeding, her chest compressed enough to make breathing hard. She knew the druids were trying to make her panic, keep her from realizing what was really happening and cutting her way free.

Even knowing that, their plan had almost worked. She _had_  been panicking, her thoughts spiraling and her vision tunneling. Then she'd felt that familiar brush of druidic magic, heard a voice like a ghost whisper in her ear, felt the prickling down her spine that told her someone was looking into her very soul.

All at once, the panic had redirected itself. Rubble and explosion forgotten, Meri had clawed at the illusion, throwing up improvised shields and shredding the invisible hands that plucked thoughts right from her head. A surge of power, maybe from her, maybe from the illusion itself, had burnt away the conjured scene. She stood now in utter darkness. There was no ground beneath her feet, no walls around her, only the distant light of stars and swirling shadows like violent spirits coming to strangle her.

 _Breathe,_  she commanded herself. She had to get out of this.

She didn't know how.

Last time, she'd needed the other blue paladins' help to break free, not to mention Blue herself. But if Meri was right, Lance, Val, and Nyma were trapped as surely as she was. The entire _team_  was trapped, and Meri might well be the only one who knew it.

She reached out for Blue, choosing to trust that Blue could sense her, even if Meri couldn't feel her response. She'd done the hard part already, stripping away the illusion they'd built to contain her. She was still caught in their web, but on the very edges of it. All she had to do was find a way to slip through the cracks, back into the real world--and then hope her makeshift shields held up against the druids' attempts to reclaim her.

Meri breathed in, and she reached for the magic within her. It burned as it stirred, agony filling her veins. Her stomach heaved at the thought of using it, but she was in the druids' territory now. She didn't have any other weapon to use.

She gathered the magic, sharpened it to a blade in her hands, and began to cut through the web of magic around her. She imagined it like a cocoon, snug and stifling, the currents of Quintessence clinging to her like silk. Her own Quintessence cut through them with ease, and their frayed ends snapped at her as they fell away.

She caught her first whiff of fresh air, the distant rumble of thunder that might have been the Blue Lion. A few more cords fell away, and she saw light, burning red through her eyelids.

"Grab him," someone said. "Leave the rest."

The cocoon tried to hold onto her, flickering with images of her friends' limp bodies, of deep gashes, bleeding freely, and horrific burns. They needed her. She had to go to them.

Meri shook off the whispers of the druids in her head, blasting away the remnants of their influence with an undirected burst of Quintessence. Her vision whited out for a moment, and when it cleared, she was kneeling in the hangar they'd entered through. The ache in her knees told her it had been a considerable amount of time. The others were ranged around her, some breathing hard, a few murmuring words she couldn't make out.

None reacted when she tried to shake them awake. She'd have to cut them free of the illusion as she'd freed herself. If she even could. Keturah had taught her how to enter minds as part of Meri's training.

She'd never learned how not to damaged the minds she touched.

Before she could even begin to pick apart the illusion shrouding Allura's mind, Meri noticed that someone was missing.

"Akira?" she called, half-rising from her crouch and turning to scan the hangar. "Akira!"

She remembered the voice she'd heard while she was breaking free from the illusion. _Grab him. Leave the rest._

Oh, no.

Meri sprang to her feet, racing out into the hallway, where she skidded to a stop. Aside from the hum of machinery and the distant murmur of life--just as likely prisoners or ordinary patrols as the ones who had taken Akira--this place was deserted, and whoever had Akira hadn't left a trace to indicate where they'd gone.

 _Blue,_  Meri thought desperately, reaching out for their bond. _Can you sense them? Can you sense Red?_

The response she got was confused, Blue vacillating before she finally gave Meri a nudge. It didn't feel very confident, but it was the only lead she had.

She took off running, blowing past guard quarters, sentry patrols, and cells occupied by figures Meri glimpsed only in passing, but who seemed to be under the same spell that had caught Meri and her friends. No wonder they weren't afraid to keep thousands of prisoners in one place. They couldn't break out if they couldn't even move their bodies.

She slowed only when sentries blocked her path, and then only long enough to crush their heads, and she turned only when Blue prompted. She quickly lost track of where she was or how to get back to the others, but that didn't matter. She had to get to Akira before--

Just, _before._

He was on his feet when she found him, and the relief could have brought her to her knees right there, except that Akira wasn't alone. He'd taken down one guard already, stealing his gun, and he used it to shoot the other as Meri charged toward the battle. The last remaining guard fired, and Akira cried out in pain.

Fury boiled in Meri's blood, and as Akira whipped his rifle up, Meri extended her hands, black lightning crackling between her fingertips.

The response was quicker and more vicious than ever before, a living, _snarling_ thing leaping from her hands and suffusing the corridor around her. Quintessence coalesced as a shield between Akira and the guard, absorbing the laser blast aimed at Akira's head--and also Akira's shot, which trended somewhere closer to the guard's thigh.

With her other hand, Meri unleashed death. Black lightning filled the air, bending around Akira like a stream parting around a stone and converging on the guard, who screamed as Meri sapped his strength.

She didn't linger to see if he stayed down. As soon as she was close enough to grab Akira, she did, closing her eyes and carrying them both away in a wisp of smoke to the nearest place she could sense that was devoid of Quintessence.

Akira gasped as they solidified, wrenching himself out of Meri's grasp and spinning, his gun snapping up.

The next moment, he recognized her, and he sagged with relief. "Fuck. I thought you were a druid."

His words twisted, but she managed a smile. "Nah, I flunked out before I finished my training."

"Lucky for me," he said. He tugged his helmet off and smoothed back his hair, breathing heavily and wincing as the motion pulled at his wound. He grunted, then calmed, then flashed a smile. "Impeccable timing as always, Naomi."

She rolled her eyes and jabbed his wounded shoulder with two fingers, letting the Quintessence she'd stolen from the guard pass into him. It wasn't the skilled healing Allura or Shay could have offered, but she'd absorbed a decent amount of Quintessence--she thought she'd gleaned some from the laser, as well--and Akira made it halfway through an insult before he stopped, probing curiously at his wound.

"Okay," Meri said, glancing around the room--a storage room, it seemed, small and dark and cramped, but at least quiet for now. She put her back to the wall and slumped to the ground. "So there are druids here."

"And they caught us in an illusion. Red helped me break out of it, and you busted yourself out. Anyone else in the real world with us?"

Meri shook her head. "I left them back in the hangar once I realized you'd been taken. Didn't seem like any of them were close to breaking free, and I'm honestly not sure I could tear apart the illusion from the outside. We might be on our own."

Akira made a face. "Red and I might be able to get through to Matt and Keith."

"Please do," she said. "Anyone we can get to help us improves our odds of making it out of here alive."

He nodded, sliding down the wall beside her. "We're going to have to go to the Heart for this. Keep an eye out for us?"

"You got it," she said. She watched as he settled in, his breathing evening out. Through his lashes, she saw a golden hue enter his eyes. "Good luck."

* * *

_Did you say Keena?_

Part of Sam had been hoping that talking to Shiro would calm the anxious storm the lab's new arrival had kicked up inside him. That part despaired at the horror in Shiro's voice, which was echoed in Allura's quieter presence.

The rest of Sam had known, the moment Keena walked into the lab, that she was bad news.

 _You've heard of her,_  Sam said.

_I wish I hadn't. What is she doing there? Has she done anything to you? To the others?_

Sam frowned, then made a conscious effort to smooth out the expression. Rax and Rolo were watching him intently, waiting for a sign. They'd all seen Keena's entrance. _Felt_ it, at that. She had a presence like Haggar's, the kind that disturbed the very atmosphere of the lab.

_She hasn't done anything yet. We were out keeping an eye on things, and she stormed in like she owned the place. The staff here seems agitated, but this Keena woman apparently outranks them. She demanded access to their files, but she wouldn't tell them what for._

Shiro didn't put his unease into words, but it filtered into the communication anyway, like static on the airwaves that made Sam's throat go tight.

_She's dangerous, I take it?_

_Very. Sam--_ Shiro paused as his voice began to shake. _I know it's not very helpful of me to tell you to look out for yourself, but... As much as you can, try to stay out of her way. Don't antagonize her, but if you can delay or derail her plans in anyway--if you can figure out what her plans_ are _\--do it. She's a vicious and vindictive woman, and she... She might have a personal grudge against you, Sam._

 _Me?_ Sam frowned again; he couldn't help it. _What have I ever done to her?_

 _Not you,_ Shiro said.

The door to the cell flew open, startling Sam out of the conversation with Shiro. He looked up to find Keena herself standing over him. Shiro had called her vicious and vindictive, but that didn't begin to cover it. There was a dangerous glint in her eye, a twitch that belied her hatred, and the twist of her lips reminded him of a snarling wolf.

"That one," she said, gesturing to Sam. "The human."

She spoke and moved with affected disinterest, like she had chosen Sam at random. She tossed her fuchsia hair out of her eyes and stepped back as the guards hauled Sam to his feet and guided him from the cell, then fell into step behind them. Her gaze burned into the back of his head.

A grudge, Shiro had called this. That seemed too mild a word.

Sam had seen evil. The druids regarded him with disgust, with disdain, with callous indifference and arrogant superiority. _This_ was something he’d never seen before, from the staff here or from anyone else.

This was a woman who would cut him open, not to accomplish some grand scheme but simply to watch him bleed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional trigger warnings: Unreality to do with the fact that the paladins are in an illusion from the moment they enter the prison and notice discrepancies to varying degrees.


	36. Ingav Prison (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins infiltrated Ingav Prison, only to be caught in the druids' illusion. Meri and Akira managed to break free--but the prison guards had singled out Akira, known to them as the "living Lion," dragging him away for a positive ID before they killed him. Meri caught up to them first, and she and Akira got away. Meanwhile Karen, Thace, Evri, and Narisa have gone to aid another rebel outpost called Ilvara Chrem that's under attack, and Keena has put in an appearance at the Vindication lab.

Ilvara Chrem was, in many ways, the polar opposite of the rebel base on Alayun. Rather than hiding in the basement of a random building in a crowded city, it was tucked away in a canyon on a barren moon. The planet this moon orbited, Mrenr, had once been a major trade center.

"I wouldn't call it 'trade' so much anymore," Narisa said as she took them in a wide arc around Mrenr and the ships and space stations hanging in its orbit. "The Mrenra people are known for their skilled craftsmen. When the Empire needs delicate work done, they bring it here, and the pay these craftsmen receive is _not_  having their families killed."

"But you didn't know the rebellion had an outpost here?" Thace asked.

Narisa's brow furrowed. "I figured there was probably something, but I didn't know what the operation was or where it was located, and I certainly didn't know the base's code name."

Karen cocked her head. "You use code names?"

"We keep as much of our operations secret as we can, even from our allies. Not like any of us can spare any help if somebody needs it, and the odds of a base going down, of all its operatives being captured and interrogated, is too great a risk to take. The fewer people who can betray us, the better."

It was a sad, brutal way to live, and Karen had to wonder just how many bases they'd lost before they turned so insular. It had been more than thirty years since the Greater Chettok officially fell under Imperial control, fifty since the fighting began. That there was still anyone fighting at all was no small feat.

Kyrien had given them coordinates for Ilvara Chrem only reluctantly; they were apparently the only one on Alayun who knew them. But they knew the rebellion couldn't survive forever by hiding. They'd been willing to take a chance on the paladins to free the poor souls in Ingav Prison, and they were willing to take another chance to save Ilvara Chrem.

"There!" Evri said, leaning forward and jabbing one claw at the viewscreen. The moon loomed large before them, pock-marked and woven with canyons. Karen didn't see any water there now, and she wondered if there had been in the past, or if the canyons had formed by some other process than erosion.

That was a philosophical question for later. Right now, they had to worry about the ships circling a spot deep in a particularly winding section of canyon. The rocky walls climbed high here, sheltering anyone and anything within from an aerial attack. Just three fighters remaining in the air, circling. Waiting to shoot down anyone who attempted to run?

A larger transport ship sat atop the cliff, and Karen couldn't tell from here whether or not there was anyone still on board.

"Drop me on top of the cliff," Evri said. "I'll handle the transport."

"Alone?" Karen asked in alarm.

Evri grinned, her crest of feathers flaring in the moment before she jammed her helmet on her head. "I wouldn't want any of the rest of you to get caught up in the explosion."

Thace gave Karen a look that was probably meant to be reassuring, as though anything about this situation _could_  reassure her, but ultimately, it wasn't Karen's call to make. Thace nodded to Narisa, who dropped Evri on the cliff a short distance away from the transport. They still seemed to Karen to be moving at a dangerous speed when Evri jumped, but a moment later she spotted her racing across the colorless dirt toward the transport, her bag full of explosives snug against her back.

Narisa shot into the sky without missing a beat, and Thace slid into the gunner's station. He picked off two of the three airborne fighters before any of them realized they had company, and Narisa rolled aside as the last fighter took a shot at them.

The transport opened fire on them, the throng in the canyon below visible as a writhing mass and the occasional stray shot toward the sky. Narisa expertly avoided every one, but Karen knew this was only the beginning. That transport could have carried hundreds of troops, and Karen didn't know how well defended this base was, but the distress call they'd sent out attested to the fact that they were overwhelmed.

And Karen was going to try to fight her way inside?

It was madness, but there was no time to back out now. Narisa dropped into the canyon, her wings barely clearing the rocky walls. The sunlight, already faint, faded to near-total darkness as they landed. Thace and Narisa sealed their helmets, hoisted their weapons, and headed for the ramp.

Karen followed after them, her lone pistol a pitiful weight in her hand.

 _You wanted this,_  she reminded herself. _Now get out there and try not to die._

* * *

Ingav Prison reminded Keith of home.

Not _home_ , he thought, his lip curling. The Empire had never been his home, just cold metal walls and a omni-present pressure to be what Zarkon wanted him to be.

Still, it reminded him of this place. There was the obvious: the metal fixtures, the low, magenta lights, the thrum of engines and life-support systems underfoot. Imperial vessels had always been louder than the castle-ship, always setting his teeth on edge and pushing him to his breaking point before the day had even started.

It was the cameras, too, watching him wherever he went. As a kid, he'd never thought about them. As a teen, he'd found ways to escape the itch between his shoulder blades, though for years, he'd never so much as dreamed of doing anything he needed to keep off the security feeds.

Then he'd met Shiro, and the camera's attentiveness had become an accusation. He still felt that itch whenever he entered a prison with the others, but he'd learned to ignore it. Mostly. Pidge usually had control of the cameras before Keith set foot inside, so he hadn't had to worry about it.

Not so here. Someone was watching him, and he was positive they wanted him dead.

The deeper into Ingav he went, the more it started to look like the _Executioner,_ where he’d grown up, albeit with more cells, like the underbelly of Sendak’s _Predator_ where the prisoners were held between Arena matches. He felt he could have opened any one of these doors and found Shiro inside, bloodied, starving, and dressed in the rags of a prisoner.

He wanted to be sick just thinking about it, but there was nowhere to go but forward.

Something shifted inside him, like an invisible hand grabbing his heart and tugging, and he stopped, putting a hand to the wall to brace himself. His fur stood on end, his ears quivering against the inside of his helmet as they searched for the source of a sound that wasn't there.

The tug came again, and Keith's vision went momentarily black. He swayed, cursed, and hastily sat himself down against the wall before he could fall and his his head. He breathed, fighting against the vertigo, clung to consciousness. He was lost and alone inside an Imperial prison; now wasn't the time to go passing out.

He pressed a hand to his chest, his pulse fluttering against his fingertips.

His pulse? No, it was too steady for that, a constant thrumming, like a purr.

Like Red.

As soon as he thought of her, he felt her--and Akira, who was a real and tangible presence, a warmth at his back in place of the cold steel wall of the prison, a hand on his shoulder.

A voice in his ear calling his name.

Keith opened his eyes and found himself in the Heart, the red glow of lava warmer and brighter than the lights of Ingav Prison. He breathed the air--clean except for a faint whiff of sulfur, and fresher than recycled air. He stumbled, head spinning, but Akira's hands shifted from his shoulders to under his elbows.

"Sorry," he said. "I tried to bring you in gently, but I don't think I quite managed it."

Closing his eyes only made the spinning worse, so Keith gave in and leaned on Akira, squinting until the world steadied itself. Matt stood nearby, and for a second, as Keith turned toward him, he thought he saw Akira there, too, but then he blinked, and it was Red, circling Matt with her tail lashing, her ears and eyes swiveling as though expecting something to come after them here in the Heart.

He blinked again, and Red was gone, just a wisp of mist in her place, vaguely _kotha-_ shaped and glowing red with the light of the lava, and when Keith turned, there was a golden glow in Akira's eyes.

He looked down, and jerked back at the sight of his reflection--or rather, of Akira's. "What the _vrekt_  is happening?"

"Druids," Akira said--Red said? The _kotha_  in the reflection growled, prowling along beneath them as Akira led Keith toward Matt. "They caught us in a massive illusion the second we entered the prison. Red snapped me out of it, and Meri managed to cut herself free, but everyone else is still locked inside."

Keith stared at him, blinking, slow to process that he was talking about Red as separate from himself, which _had_  to mean this was Akira, right? He looked down at the reflection again.

Akira followed his gaze. "Oh. Uh. Try not to think too hard about it. Red and I are very... fluid... here. More separate than we are in the physical realm, I think, but it's hard to manifest separately. Or consistently." He looked uncomfortable, but shook himself and took them both by the hand. "I'm going to send you back to your bodies. I think Red and I can shield you from the illusion, now that you're out of it. I can't promise our protection will be absolute. The illusion might start to creep back in at the edges. Red will try to guide you to where Meri and I are, and we'll try to find you."

"And then?" Matt asked.

Akira spread his hands. "Then we see if we can figure out how to crack open the mental prison they built inside Ingav's hull."

* * *

The ships kept coming.

Coran maintained an outward calm, directing his crew with a measured voice, combating the panic the only way he knew how. He returned Command's calls the same way, and tried not to let on that he saw the cracks in their composure.

They were holding.

They hadn't expected to _have_  to hold this long, but they _were_  holding. The Castle of Lions and the _Hope of Kera_  were cracking open warships' shields fast enough that they couldn't build up on the battlefield, but more kept coming to replace them, and their ion cannons had already battered the castle's shields enough times that warning lights were beginning to light up the console like fireworks.

"Zarkon's never sent this much at us at once," Anamuri said. She spoke in a low voice, on a private line to Coran's station, and he answered in kind. Neither of their bridge crews needed to hear this conversation. "What's changed?"

"He may have realized the paladins are absent from this battle," Coran said. "He's trying to draw them out, perhaps?"

"Or he knows they aren't here _to_ draw out."

Coran's eyes darted to the side. The Kahales were too far behind him for him to actually see them without turning his head, but he'd been keeping tabs on them, waiting for some sign that Hunk and Shay were injured. He'd felt vague unease from his own paladins, a flash of disgust, then fear from Meri, but both had faded to a kind of wary watchfulness. The paladins weren't safe, but they weren't in any more danger than usual for a field mission.

He gestured to Anamuri to wait, then opened another call to the paladins' lines. "Paladins, do you read me?"

A burst of surprise from Meri preceded her answer, fading quickly into relief. "Coran! Thank god. I thought they'd jammed our comms."

"That was just the illusion," Akira said.

Coran frowned. "Illusion?"

"This isn't a normal prison," Meri said. "The prisoners are all caught up in a druidic illusion spell. It caught us when we entered. Akira and I managed to break free, and I think he got Keith and Matt--"

"We're here," came Matt's groggy voice. "Trying to wait until we're a little less dizzy before we charge into a fight."

"Caution?" Meri asked dryly. "From a Red?"

Coran's lip twitched, but his humor was short-lived. "It sounds like you're all dealing with issues of your own, so I won't waste your time: Zarkon did launch an attack, as we expected."

"Is it bad?" Akira asked.

Coran stroked his mustache. "It's not a disaster, but I wouldn't call it smooth flying, either." He locked his eyes on the comms screen, though this link didn't include a visual component. "Worry about yourselves first, but once you've finished, I would ask that you hurry back here. We're probably going to need you before today is over."

* * *

Ilvara Chrem was in chaos.

Karen had never been in a real battle before, to say if this was normal, but to her it felt as though both sides had descended into anarchy. The Imperial forces were a swarm around the outside of the base, which itself was only distinguishable because of the concentration of enemies, like ants gathering around a discarded piece of fruit.

About half the ranks watched the sky above and the canyon in either direction, alert for the enemy that had shot down their fighters. The rest remained focused on the base. They hacked at the walls, set charges at what Karen could only presume were doors or windows--but they did all this in a meandering, disjointed manner. One squad often crossed into another's path, or had to be shouted away from a charge set to blow.

The rebels, meanwhile, attacked from vantage points unseen. The base must have stretched up inside the canyon wall to hidden openings in the stone from which the rebels dropped bombs of their own, shot with lasers, or hurled other, improvised weapons.

The rebel attacks, she noted, came far less frequently than the Imperials'.

"We can't take them all on at once," Karen said. Her words came out as more of a question than she'd intended, but fortunately Thace shook his head.

"They'd have an emergency exit somewhere." They'd stopped behind a mound of loose stone a short distance down the canyon, out of sight of the scouts who were watching for their approach. One of the fighters seemed to have landed on top of the ground troops, crushing a large number of them.

Narisa poked her head up over the rocks and frowned. "If they're still in there, it means their backdoor isn't an option. Either it's guarded, the Galra collapsed it, or they don't have any vehicles to use to escape even if they did make it out."

"The last option is our best hope," Thace said. "I'm not sure how many people they have stationed here, but we can ferry them away a dozen or so at a time if we have to."

" _If_  we can get in and out without being seen," Karen said.

Thace smiled at her. "Precisely. Narisa. Do  your people have any sort of code you could use to communicate with the people in that base? Something to tell them help is here?"

"We have a few signals, but I don't know how widely they're used."

"Try them anyway. This will all go much more smoothly if we have help on the inside."

Narisa nodded, then settled into place with her rifle pointed toward the hidden base. She waited, watching the battle, until she found the origin of some of the attacks, then flashed her laser sight in a pattern, communicating the things Thace told her to: that allies were here, that they had a ship, that they needed a status report and a path in. She repeated it three times, and as she started the fourth repetition, their answer came, a laser flashing on the stone over Karen's head.

"Eleven survivors," Narisa said. "Two of them badly injured. The Galra haven't found their back door, but they have patrols in the area."

Karen shot a glance at Thace. He hadn't even flinched at the casual hatred Narisa put into the word _Galra,_ as he hadn't reacted any other time she'd done the same. It had to bother him, though, right?

Now obviously wasn't the time to ask. Narisa got directions to the base's rear entrance--around a bend in the canyon, through a crack in the stone to a hidden door--and they set out. Karen clutched her gun like a lifeline and followed after Thace and Narisa, but to her surprise, they didn't attack the patrols in this section of the valley. There were two of them, space widely enough that Karen's group could slip through without being seen. Karen held her breath and stepped as lightly as she could in an attempt to match the eerie silence with which Thace and Narisa moved.

They found the crack easily enough, and followed it back to the door. As they approached, the door was thrown wide, two aliens with rifles stepping out, the barrels of their guns glowing as they aimed them at Thace's head.

"I knew it," said the one on the left, turning to shout over her shoulder. "It's a trap!"

* * *

Keena took Sam to a lab--smaller and more sparsely furnished than the usual one, with an armless chair where the exam table normally would have been and fewer machines around the room. Sam stopped for a moment in the doorway, surprised to find himself in such non-threatening quarters, then remembered that he was trying not to piss anyone off and continued walking.

"Please," Keena said, gesturing to the chair. "Sit. You may go," she added to the guards, who had started to follow Sam in. They stopped at Keena's dismissal, which was lighter and cheerier than anything Sam had hear from the staff in... well, _ever._

The guards traded looks, but Keena had decided to ignore them altogether, and they silently withdrew as Keena studied Sam. She pulled over a chair of her own and sat facing him, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Her gaze made Sam squirm, but he forced himself to hold still--not only so as to not anger Keena, but also to not alarm Rax and Rolo, who were sure to have followed him. They were probably even now looking for ways to disrupt whatever Keena had planned.

 _Don't do anything rash,_  he thought, wishing he could risk saying so aloud, or stepping out of his body long enough to speak with them. With Keena sitting so close, though, and watching him so intently, he didn't dare risk it.

"Sam Holt."

The sound of his name--something no one else in this place seemed to know or care about--startled Sam into sitting up straight.

Keena smiled. "Yes. I know who you are."

Sam waited for her to go on, but she seemed to be waiting for him. First she knew his name, now she wanted to have a conversation? Who was this woman, and what did she want? "And... how do you know that?"

"I know your wife."

Sam sucked in a breath, afraid to say anything, afraid to even move. Shiro had said this woman might hold a grudge against him, but not for anything he'd done. Did that mean...?

"A _remarkably_ tenacious woman, your wife," Keena said, seemingly oblivious to Sam's discomfort. She leaned back in her chair, crossing one ankle atop the other knee. "She understands people. You know that? She gets how they work, and how to get them to do exactly what she wants them to do."

 _Shiro,_  Sam thought, reaching out desperately with the power the Black Lion had gifted to him. The moment of connection left him lightheaded, as usual, but he curled his fingers around his kneecaps and breathed. "She's always been a people person," he said. It sounded inane, he knew, but he didn't know how else to fill the silence.

Shiro's attention swung his way, frantic and sharp-edged, but Sam didn't wait for him to ask the questions that were buzzing in the air between them.

 _Keena and Karen have a history,_ Sam said. _What is it?_

Keena laughed. "A people person. That's certainly one way to put it." She stood, pacing around the edge of the room, her fingers trailing along the instruments on their trays, the edges of display screens, the casing of sensors and computers and machines whose purpose Sam couldn't guess.

_Keena's son is one of the paladins. She tried to manipulate him, treated him like shit. She's a terrible mother, Sam, and Karen cared too much about her son not to intervene._

Sam's mouth ran dry. So that was it. Karen had come between Keena and her son. She'd taken him away, or forced Keena to go, or just driven a wedge between them. In Keena's eyes, it might all be the same, and it all demanded the same retribution.

"I owe Karen," Keena said. Still light, still friendly, and if Sam didn't have Shiro inside his head to tell him otherwise, he might even believe Keena was a friend who'd come to help him.

Keena passed out of Sam's line of vision, and he was too paralyzed with fear to turn and track her progress. _I don't know what she's planning,_ Sam told Shiro. _But it's probably not good. Just in case... tell my family I love them._

"And Sam?" Keena said. There was a click, and something jolted the back of his neck, searing heat spreading from the implant at the base of his skull for a moment. The world began to fade, pulling back the way it did when they put him under, and his grip on the adjunct bond faltered. Shiro called his name, his voice echoing in Sam's ears.

Keena stepped in front of Sam once more, a small silver device in her hand. She grabbed him by the hair and tilted his head back until their eyes met.

"I always repay my debts."

* * *

Matt had to sit in the hangar for far too long to get his bearings. Just returning from the Heart was disorienting, maybe because he'd never made the trip from outside the Red Lion. It left him dizzy, his limbs heavy, his ears ringing with an explosion that hadn't actually happened.

..The illusions might have something to do with the disorientation. They lurked there still at the edges of his awareness, a ringing silence that made him slow to process Keith's questions, a tunneling in his vision that warped the hangar, made it look more like the druid lab Matt had found himself in just before Akira yanked him out of the illusion.

(If he was being honest, his disorientation might have had more to do with that than anything else. Keith, certainly, seemed fine. It was just Matt who couldn't make his body feel like his own.)

 _Get up_ , he told himself. _Akira and Meri are out there. They need you to get off your ass and help them._

It took him another thirty seconds, the ringing in his ears building as Keith reached out to steady him. His touch felt cold and cruel, reminiscent of Matt's time in an Imperial lab--memories he'd thought were long since faded, but which blazed with life every time he closed his eyes.

He shoved the sensations away and stood--and Keith had to catch him as his knee began to buckle. He'd fallen to his knees when the illusion hit and remained there, kneeling for god knew how long. His bad knee was stiff and aching, the lower half of his leg tingling as circulation returned.

"I'm fine," he said, flexing his legs a few times before putting his weight on it again. It held this time, with only a small twinge, and he pulled away from Keith. "See? No problem."

Keith frowned at him, clearly unconvinced, but there wasn't time to sit around arguing. Matt headed for the door...

Then stopped as Hunk turned toward him as he passed. The motion almost gave Matt a heart attack; all the other paladins remained motionless. Many of them were on their knees, as Hunk was, but aside from that, they might as well be sleeping, and showed no signs of awareness of the hangar around them.

Hunk's brow furrowed as Matt stepped toward him, and Matt realized Hunk was humming under his breath. It didn't have a tune in the usual sense, or at least not one Matt was able to follow, but he recognized it as the Balmera song, which he'd occasionally caught Hunk or Shay singing while they worked on Yellow.

"Hunk?" Matt reached out, and there was a moment, when his hand found Hunk's shoulder, that Matt swore he could feel the illusion trying to pull him back in. It became difficult to focus on Hunk, and the sound of Keith's breathing behind him turned into the rush of air in the ventilation system.

Hunk gave a cry, lurching back from Matt's touch. The sound startled Matt back into reality, but Hunk stared around himself with unseeing eyes--mobile once again, but clearly not entirely free from the illusion.

"Hunk!" Keith said, dropping to one knee in front of him. "It's okay. You're in Ingav Prison. Akira says there are druids here, and they caught us in an illusion when we came in. I think their hold on you is slipping. ...Can you hear me?"

Hunk blinked a few times, his head swiveling toward Keith--toward his voice, at least. "Keith?" He shook his head, blinking again like he was trying to clear his vision. "I--yeah. Yeah, I can hear you. I don't-- Where are we? I can't... I _think_  I see you? Sometimes. It's hard to focus."

"Try not looking directly at him," Matt said. "Use your peripheral vision."

Hunk listened, turning his head slightly to one side and frowning. "Okay. Okay, yeah.... You're saying the rest of this isn't real?"

"The rest of what?" Keith asked.

Matt left them to sort out how much of what Hunk was seeing was real, and how much was the illusion. His eyes had found Shay, who was sprawled on the ground nearby, her face pinched with worry. He knelt beside her, heart twinging at her song--as faint as Hunk's, but more frantic. "Shay. Wake up."

Her reaction wasn't as dramatic as Hunk's, but she seemed to be in the same position--aware of the real world around her, most of her senses free of the illusion, but still plagued by visions of prison cells, bloody arenas, even rocky tunnels that sounded more like something Matt might find on a Balmera than an Imperial space station.

"We're only going to slow you down," Hunk said once Keith had brought him up to speed. He clung to Shay's hand like a lifeline, staring into the distance and humming a distressed-sounding non-melody. "You should leave us here."

"I wish I didn't have to leave _anyone_  here," Matt said. "You can at least walk, so you're coming. We might need your help."

Hunk laughed at that, the sound thin and frightened, but he stood, huddling close to Shay, and nodded. "Okay. Lead the way."

Matt did, Keith bringing up the rear to ensure Hunk and Shay didn't fall behind. Ingav being as big as it was, Matt would have expected to get lost, but there seemed to be a string tied around his heart, pulling him onward. He'd felt it even before he started moving, but it was more insistent now, like Red and Akira were growing worried that he was taking so long to get to them.

In the end, Akira found them more than they found Akira. He came barreling out of a side corridor, Meri jogging to keep up with him. He turned toward them, and the tension visibly drained out of him as he caught sight of them.

"Thank _god_ ," Akira breathed.

Meri blinked. "Hunk! Shay!" Both turned toward her voice, frowned, and then carefully adjusted, as they had begun to do, to put her in their peripheral vision.

"Is that Meri?" Hunk asked. "That sounds like Meri. That's not part of the illusion, is it?"

"It's her," Matt said. He meant to say more, but Akira had reached him and caught him in a crushing embrace that made speaking more than a little difficult.

"They're not entirely free of the illusion," Keith explained, while Matt was getting his breath back. Akira moved onto Keith, next, and Matt continued the explanation.

"The druids didn't seem to know how to deal with their bond, or the way they communicate with the song. Hunk and Shay could sense each other nearby, and I think that made it so the illusion never totally took root."

Meri nodded. "So like what happened with Akira. He and Red sensed you and Keith--and then when the guards took Akira away, he could feel you getting further from him. That's when he snapped out of it." She pursed her lips, then crossed to Shay and took her hands. "I'm going to try something, okay?"

Shay nodded, and Meri's hands flared bright with Quintessence that stung Matt's eyes. None of the others would be able to see it, of course, but he winced and turned away. "The guards took you?" he asked Akira. "Why? What did they do?"

"Nothing," Akira said. "Meri helped me get away before they could do anything."

"What do you think they were _going_  to do?" Keith asked.

Akira shook his head. "What good does it do to speculate? It didn't happen, so it doesn't matter."

Meri paused in whatever she was doing to Shay and glared at Akira. "They came for you, Akira. They targeted _you_ , specifically, when they had the entire team to choose from."

Unease curled in Matt's gut. "You don't think they know about..."

"How?" Akira demanded. "Who could have told them?" He shook his head. "They probably saw that I was the only one not in paladin armor and figured I'd make the safest hostage."

That was a weak argument, and Matt suspected even Akira knew it. Before any of them could argue, a laser flashed past Meri's head, close enough to leave a dark scorch mark across the white surface of her helmet. She flinched, shoving Shay against the wall, and glanced behind her, toward a distant corner where a group of at least a dozen guards had just appeared. Matt cursed, summoning his bayard.

"What?" Hunk's voice shook. "What's happening? Is it bad? It sounds bad."

"A few guards," Meri said. She leveled Matt, Keith, and Akira with a stern look. "I think I can get Shay and Hunk out of the illusion, but you're going to need to buy me some time."

Keith bared his teeth in a savage grin. "With pleasure."

He charged into the fray before Matt could warn him to be careful. Rolling his eyes, Matt activated his bayard, letting it take its pistol form. His knee had mostly stopped throbbing by now, but he didn't want to risk it when he didn't have much backup. Instead, he nudged Hunk closer to Meri, where he would be out of the way. Fumbling along Hunk's gauntlet for the manual trigger, Matt activated his shield, then positioned it to provide the best cover.

"Hold it just like that," he ordered Hunk.

He didn't wait to see if Hunk would follow his instructions; Akira was doing his best to cover Keith from a distance, but there were too many guards, all of them swarming around Keith. Matt raised his pistol and picked off two of them that were hanging back at the edges of the group.

"Hey!" he called. "Don't forget about us!"

Several of the remaining guards spun, abandoning Keith to focus on targets they could actually reach. Good. It was easier to aim when he didn't have to worry about hitting Keith.

They made steady progress this way, taunting a couple of guards into charging them, or taking cover to return fire, and picking them off while Keith handled the rest. There were too many for him to fight effectively; Matt only saw one guard go down to Keith's sword; but he was quick and agile, and they didn't seem to be able to land any solid hits, either.

For a while.

Matt noticed the change in Akira before he registered Keith's gasp of pain. One moment, Akira was standing tall, firing a steady stream of blasts and slowly thinning the herd around Keith.

The next, he'd tossed his gun aside, dropping low and charging into the fray with a snarl that barely sounded human. Matt cursed and snatched up Akira's gun, not letting up on his own assault. He let loose with both guns at once, choosing any target he could that Akira wasn't already on top of.

They'd managed to put down half the guard patrol by now, and Matt dropped two more while Keith and Akira finished the rest. As soon as the last one fell, Matt rushed over, alert for a second wave, heart hammering. He expected to find Keith bleeding out, but it was barely a graze, a cut that went through his armor near his left hip, but only just. A single dribble of blood ran down his thigh.

Akira was shaking, breathing harder than either of his paladins, and he pulled off his helmet to wipe the sweat from his brow, his hand trailing down his face.

" _Jesus_ ," he hissed. "Sorry about that."

"You okay?" Matt asked. He passed Akira his pistol, hovering close just in case something was seriously wrong.

Akira offered him a thin smile. "I'll live. ...I don't think Red likes druids very much."

"That makes two of us," Meri said, jogging over to join them with Hunk and Shay trailing behind. They still seemed disoriented, but when Hunk looked up, he found Matt's eyes at once and offered half a smile. Meri glanced around, then steered Akira toward another hallway. "We shouldn't hang around. Who knows how many more patrols they have in the area."

"Probably not many," Hunk said. "If everyone here's trapped in an illusion, they don't need regular guards all that much, do they?"

"Let's hope not." Matt wrinkled his nose. "I didn't like the odds of us taking on a building full of guards when we had the full team. Now that we're down by half, we're even worse off."

"And we're up against a tougher enemy than we expected, guards or no guards." Meri set a brisk pace, moving with confidence past the entrance to another cell block like the half a dozen Matt had passed on the way here. The hallways between were long and bare, only a handful of cross-corridors leading off from this one. Matt tried to identify the rooms they passed, but it was difficult. The halls immediately outside the hangar had seemed to be mostly storage spaces, perhaps a few offices or records room. Shortly after the skirmish with the guards, they passed what looked like barracks, with a kitchen not far away.

Nearly everything else was cell blocks, dozens upon dozens of them, all stacked up like boxes in a cargo hold. Security was minimal, and what Keith couldn't open with his handprint, he cut through with his sword.

This wasn't a prison so much as a storage facility, designed to hold the maximum number of prisoners with the minimum number of staff.

They finally took shelter in a kitchen unit--the only other structure besides the cell blocks they'd found with any frequency. It was simple and unstaffed, a series of food goo machines not unlike the one on the castle--albeit less elegant in design--lining the far wall. Conveyor belts looped around to cycle empty bowls through the dispensing stations. The whole thing was quiet now, but it did make Matt wonder how the druids here managed to keep their prisoners alive. They had to release them from the illusion, or at least weaken it enough for them to regain basic control of their body, in order to let them eat.

It was the closest to reality these prisoners probably ever came, and it made Matt shudder as it called to mind fragmented memories of a long stay in a small space. He hadn't even had meals to remind him what was real; his entire stay in the E-dep chambers seemed like a dream. He knew more about them from reading the records Pidge had extracted from Vel-17 than from his own memories.

"Okay," Meri said, jumping up to sit on one of the conveyor belts. "We need a plan."

"Kill the druids?" Akira suggested. "You managed to free Hunk and Shay, but they weren't fully in the illusion. Even if you could free the others, there's no way you can do the same for every single prisoner in this place."

"They shouldn't be able to hold so many people in personalized illusions, either," Meri said. "Not unless there were hundred of them here--and if there were, they'd already have swarmed us. My guess is they only have enough druids to maintain the prison. Any extra staff was probably called off to the war ages ago. I'll bet they have an amplifier somewhere, too. Stretch a skeleton crew to maintain a population of thousands."

"Amplifier?" Akira asked.

"A crystal, or maybe an array of them," Meri said. "The druids use them to make their magic more powerful. It might be where the druids are stationed, but I think it's bigger than that... a whole network of crystals spread throughout the station like little beacons to transmit the illusion."

Matt narrowed his eyes, noting the way Meri's gaze seemed continually drawn back to a particular point on the wall. "You can sense it, can't you?"

She jumped, staring at him with her lips slightly parted. "...Maybe," she said. "I sensed _something_  when I first found Akira. I had to use some magic to get him out of there, and it sort of... resonated."

"Do you think you could use that resonance to lead us to the amplifier?"

She didn't like the idea, he could tell. She warred with herself for a moment, then finally nodded. "It's worth a try. Let's go."

* * *

"Wait!" Karen cried, placing herself in front of Thace before she could think better of it. He stiffened at her back, and Karen's mind momentarily whited out as she found herself staring down the barrel of a gun, a pinprick of blue-white light stoking inside it.

Someone--Karen couldn't tell who, as all three rebels visible to her had tinted visors on their helmets--grunted. "She's not Galra."

"I'm not," Karen said, finding her voice once more. The moment hardly felt real, but she fell into her courtroom demeanor easily enough. "I'm human. My name is Karen, and this is Thace. We're allies of Voltron. We've been working with Kyrien's crew--they're the ones who sent us to help you."

She reached behind her, breathing a little easier when Narisa stepped up, flashing a sign with her hand that made two of the rebels glance at each other, though the one with the gun appeared unmoved.

"We have a ship," Karen said. "We can get you and your people out of here. We can get you medical help." She paused, noting a minute drift in the angle of the gun's barrel. "I know you don't trust us, but isn't a desperate chance better than none at all?"

Another long silence answered, but desperation hung in the air like smoke from a brush fire. These people _didn't_  have an alternative. If they stayed here, they died--their defenses may have held so far, but with the Imperials detonating bombs, that front wall was going to collapse sooner or later, and then the survivors would be overwhelmed.

"Zenza," said the rebel who had spoken before, the shortest of the three, who stood behind the one with the gun and stepped forward now to place a hand on their shoulder. "Let them in."

Zenza hesitated, then slowly lifted their gun away. "Fine. But if we all die, I want it on the record that it's not my fault."

The short one squeezed their shoulder, and then all three of them stepped back to allow Karen, Thace, and Narisa inside. Thace caught Karen's hand as she started forward and gave her a stern, almost reproachful look. She just smiled, patted his cheek, and continued on inside.

She found herself in a narrow entryway, stone walls closing in on either side. She could have stood on Thace's shoulders and barely brushed the ceiling, but the two of them couldn't comfortably walk side-by-side. Zenza and their shorter companion led the way through a winding tunnel, the third rebel remaining behind at the door, perhaps to call ahead with a warning if anyone had followed Karen's group.

The path wound around, sloping generally up, and finally opened onto a spacious room like a loft, with shuttered windows along one wall where three more rebels were gathered with dwindling piles of weapons both real and improvised. The right side of the room, near a railing that overlooked an even larger space below, had been set up as triage, though Karen wasn't sure if that was because they didn't have an infirmary here, or if that space had been compromised in the initial attack.

This base felt far more rustic than the one on Alayun, between the rough stone walls, the open spaces, and the curtains that had been strung up in place of doors. This place must have been built in secret and without very many resources--though the same could probably be said for much of the Chettok rebellion.

"Lleloth," Zenza called, waving down a burly figure darting among the chaos of the loft. They turned, and Zenza jerked a thumb toward Karen and the others. "These are them. They've got a Galra with them, but they claim they're friendly. Minrin thinks we should trust them."

The short rebel from the rear entrance elbowed them in the ribs. "I wouldn't go _that_ far. I just think we're running out of options."

Unlike most of the rebels, Lleloth wasn't wearing a helmet. Not a voluntary decision, if the blood at their hairline and the dents and discoloration of the rest of their armor was any indication. They were humanoid, like everyone else here--bipedal, two arms, eyes that looked more like pits in their skull than anything Karen’s mind knew how to process. Their face was vaguely reptilian, with soft, fine scales that glinted crimson in the light.

"Minrin may be right," they said, stepping past Zenza to examine the newcomers more closely. "We had no warning before the Galra attacked. Half my crew was killed before we knew what was happening. We managed to kill their commander and force them back, but now we're barricaded in, outnumbered, and rapidly running out of weapons. What do you have to offer?"

At that moment, their comms buzzed, and Evri's voice spoke in Karen's ear. "Charges are set. I had to kill a couple of the bastards still stationed up here, so if they don't already know I'm here, they will soon. Should I blow it now, or do you want me to wait?"

Thace's lips curved into a smile. "A distraction," he told Lleloth. "Evri, hold for now. Pull back to the ship if you can, and wait for my signal."

"Copy that."

"Gather your people," Thace said. "We're going to have to punch through the bulk of their troops, but if this goes right, they won't be in a position to put up much of a fight. Ready?"

Lleloth smiled, a grim smile that said they were preparing to meet their end. "Ready."

"Then let's go."

* * *

Hunk was starting to miss the illusion. As creepy as that version of Ingav had been--and it was _incredibly_  creepy--at least it had been empty. No prisoners locked inside cells like puppets with their strings cut, no troops of guards coming charging around corners.

No druids.

Meri seemed less than certain that she was leading them in the right direction, but in the last ten minutes they'd run into two druids, so Hunk figured they had to be getting close to _something_  they weren't supposed to go near.

When they finally found the amplifier, though, even Hunk was caught off guard.

From the outside, it looked like just another cell block, and Hunk frowned as Meri suddenly veered to the side and teleported herself to the other side of the door. She'd been doing that, on and off--stealing Quintessence from the guards, then using it in occasional bursts to figure out where the resonance was coming from, like some sort of magical sonar. Akira, who had been keeping pace with Meri, skidded past the door, while Keith whirled and sliced through the lock.

An alarm began to blare, because _of course,_ but Hunk spared only the briefest of glares for Keith. The rest of his ire was directed at Meri. "I thought we were supposed to be dealing with the illusion," he said, chasing her down past rows of cells. "Why are we suddenly taking a detour for these prisoners?"

"Not the prisoners," Meri said. She sounded breathless, and all this druid magic had painted deep shadows beneath her eyes. Her _glaes_  had begun to bleed, and her face had a gaunt look, like she hadn't been eating well for the last few months.

Before Hunk could ask what she meant, she teleported again, disappearing to... Hunk couldn't actually tell. Nowhere else in this room, but the windows on the front of all the cells were so small he could only see into the handful right beside him. What _was_  she doing?

"I hope she has a plan," Matt muttered, his bayard aimed toward the door Keith had cut open. No one had appeared there yet, but it was only a matter of time. Hunk just hoped it was more guards, not a full complement of druids. Meri could say there weren't many of them here all she liked; one was too many for Hunk's liking.

A nondescript door at the far end of the cell block, which Hunk had missed in his initial scan of the room, suddenly slid open, Meri trailing black smoke on the other side. "Found it!" she called.

Hunk sprinted over. He wasn't sure he wanted to be closer to the thing that amplified druid magic, but he knew he didn't want to be out in the open when security came to deal with the blaring alarm. He was the first through the door, though Shay and Matt were close behind, Keith and Akira guarding their rear as they approached more slowly.

Despite the situation, the hidden room took Hunk's breath away. When Meri had talked about druids and crystals, he'd imagined the corrupt crystals he'd seen a handful of times before. Sendak had used one way back at the beginning of all this when he took over the castle, and there had been more inside Haggar's planet-killing super-weapon, amplifying and directing the druids' magic. Those crystals had all been a deep purple that was almost black and seemed to absorb light rather than refract it.

This looked like a room plucked straight out of a thriving Balmera. A single massive, brilliant crystal stood at the center of the room, and hundreds more lined the walls, arranged in intricate patterns and connected by luminous silver wire. Even Hunk could feel the pulse of Quintessence in this room, and it choked him up for reasons he couldn't explain.

"Okay," Akira said. "So, what, we just smash it?"

"It and however many others they have scattered around this place." Meri stepped forward, peeling off her glove to press her bare hand to the crystal. Her _glaes_ glowed violet, weeping down her cheek. "They're connected. I think I can find the rest of them from here."

"Cool," Keith said. "Any plan to get _us_ out of here?"

Meri breathed in, and Matt suddenly hissed, shielding his eyes and turning away from her. Her _glaes_  dripped down nearly to her jawline. "Hold on," she said. "I'm gonna see how many people I can teleport at once."

Footsteps pounded in the hallway outside the cell block. Hunk wasn't sure druid teleportation was something he needed to experience to have a full and complete life, but he was fairly certain it was the best chance to _prolong_  his life right now, so he shifted toward Meri, grabbing onto her elbow as the others shuffled in around him, Matt keeping his head ducked and twisted away from Meri.

Hunk had time to wonder what she looked like, drawing on the Quintessence of a druid amplifier. Then Meri stretched her hand out behind her, dragging Hunk and Keith along with her, and unleashed a blinding bolt of energy at the array. A tremendous _boom_  thundered in Hunk's ears.

The next heartbeat brought silence and darkness, the darkness burning away like mist as the light of a new crystal washed over them.

The blaring alarm was hardly a murmur in the distance here, which was nice. Hunk might not have noticed it if he hadn't been listening for it. He started to pull back, but Meri barked at him to hold on. Her voice, harsher than usual, with a strange _force_  behind it, stopped him in his tracks. Meri blasted these crystals like she had the last, and whisked them away again, then repeated the process again, and again.

As the adrenaline faded back to a simmering baseline, Hunk had time to feel the jumps as more than just a disorienting blur. The smoke seemed to seep _inside_  his armor, reaching clammy fingers down his spine, and the darkness he saw between the _here_ and the _there_  pulled at him, beckoning him into an emptiness he felt in his very soul.

After the fourth crystal array, Meri stumbled. She was pale and sweating, her hand shaking as she raised it toward the crystal beside her. Akira grabbed it before she could go blasting off more lightning, and slowly lowered it to her side.

"Wait," he said. "You're going to work yourself to death at this rate."

Meri shook her head. "'s not enough. There's still more."

"And we'll get to them," he said. "Stop. _Breathe_. Take a second to catch your breath. When you're ready to go, _we'll_  take care of the crystal. Hunk?"

Hunk let his bayard fall into his hand, though he didn't activate it yet. "Leave it to me."

"See?" Akira tapped the side of Meri's helmet, turning her face toward him. "You don't have to do _everything_  yourself."

She scowled, and maybe it was the shadows under her eyes or the hollowness to her cheeks, but it looked more vicious than anything Hunk had ever seen from her before.

Then the moment passed, and Meri sagged against Akira, nodding into his shoulder. "Okay. Five minutes."

"Ten minutes," Akira said. "Sounds perfect."

She jabbed him in the shoulder, and Akira guided her toward the wall, while Hunk, Shay, Keith, and Matt positioned themselves around the room, ready for guards or druids to come exterminate the problem.

* * *

When the time came to make their escape, Karen found herself leading the charge together with Thace, Narisa, and a few others. Thace had tried to give her an out by asking her to help carry the wounded--and maybe she would have served them all better by doing so, but they _had_ people to carry the wounded. The Empire had led with explosives that left some people blinded, some with burned hands, and one with a missing arm. They couldn't shoot a gun, but they could shoulder a sling, and that was good enough.

Karen had a gun, and clear vision, and full use of both hands. She was a decent shot, though that hadn't been tried in battle yet, and she knew where they were going.

She wasn't prepared for this at all.

But they'd wasted as much time as they dared gathering everyone together, their most sensitive records and their most valuable supplies, and now it was time to move. Thace led them all to the canyon around the bend from the main assault. He and Narisa shot down the patrol passing by, the din of the frontal assault drowning out the startled shouts.

"All right," Thace said, raising Evri on the comms. "Blow it."

There was a moment's delay, and Karen pressed herself against the wall as Thace had instructed, ducked low, her helmet sealed to minimize the noise.

It rattled her anyway, a crack of thunder centered inside her chest that drew on far longer than she'd expected, fainter after the initial blast but still rattling her bones in their sockets. She instinctively ducked even lower. It took her a second or two to realize Thace had started moving, most of the rebels with him, though those few like Lleloth who'd lost their helmet, were stunned a few moments longer.

Karen raced to catch up with the front-runners, her pistol clutched at her shoulder and pointed at the sky. They rounded the bend in the canyon to a scene of chaos. The transport that had been parked atop the cliff was gone--as was a large chunk of stone. It had fallen into the valley, crushing many of the soldiers below. Most of the rest were on hands and knees or shoving each other to the ground in a desperate race to get away from the rock slide.

As Karen watched, another large section of the cliff sloughed off, dropping to the ground below with a tremendous crash.

Thace opened fire as he veered toward the narrow strip of canyon not buried in broken stone. Soldiers fell, and others scrambled to get away. A few remained, turning back to return fire, but Thace, Narisa, and the rebels shot them before they could.

Karen remembered the Imperial soldier in the alley on Alayun. Her first kill, and one she couldn't even claim as intentional. She'd had nightmares each of the last two nights, and her hands shook now as she aimed her gun at her first target, a hulking man still clutching a detonator. She wondered if he'd set off the blast that had cost that one rebel their arm.

Karen thought of her children--of Matt, kidnapped and tortured until he clung to battle as the one way remaining to him to take charge of his fate. Of Pidge, who'd risked everything to find their father and brother, only to stumble into a war that had no right to claim them. They fought anyway. She thought of Keith, trained to be a soldier from the time he was a child, his only choice whether to be the victim or the perpetrator of the violence that permeated his world.

She thought of Val, the day she'd shot Iverson with his own gun, tears streaming down her face--terrified, but ready to do what she had to to keep others from suffering the same fate as her.

Karen pulled the trigger.

Her training with Thace had paid off, it seemed. Her shot burned a hole in the armor over the man's heart, and he went down. It was a silent thing, his death, and Karen wondered if that made it more horrific or less.

There were other soldiers to take his place, and a stream of exhausted and wounded rebels behind her. Karen shifted her focus to the next target, and took them down the way she had the first. She stopped thinking, just chose her target, fired, and moved on.

They broke through to the other side.

Karen wasn't sure if it was the number of soldiers who had been crushed by the collapsing canyon wall, or if their panic made them such easy targets that half a dozen guns took them down in bare moments. Thace fell back to the rear of the group with a pair of rebels, watching for signs of Imperial stragglers while Narisa shouted for everyone to follow her.

They ran, and the ship came into view around the next corner, Evri standing at the base of the ramp, her bloodied right arm cradled against her stomach and a pair of Imperial soldiers dead at her feet. Her eyes fluttered closed at the sight of them, but she recovered quickly, waving them on, ushering the rebels inside the ship. There wasn't a large passenger space, but they crowded in, and Narisa sprinted to the front of the cockpit to begin preparations for takeoff.

Karen lingered on the ramp, clasping hands and shoulders as sobbing rebels passed her. Thace was the last one inside, his eyes still trained on the canyon as he shouted at Narisa to get them out of here.

The ramp closed, the grating beneath her feet shifted as they angled for the sky. Karen's heart pounded in her chest, and her hands shook so bad she struggled to holster her pistol.

"We did it," Thace said. He glanced over his shoulder, relief evident in his voice. He was as winded as Karen, and lifted a hand to his head as he slumped against the wall. But he was smiling, and Karen found herself doing the same.

* * *

Allura raced the halls of Ingav, her heart in her throat. She could feel Shiro's terror even now. The link between them had broken when Sam went quiet for a second time, but its echoes remained.

Or maybe she was getting closer. Shiro was here somewhere, likely as alone as Allura, and she thought he was close enough for the paladin bond to resonate between them. She hoped he was. The sooner they found each other, the sooner they could come up with a plan for finding the rest of their team and finishing this mission.

Then, Sam.

She paid less attention to the prison around her than she should have, a large portion of her mind attentive to the silence within and waiting for Sam to reestablish communication. The first time he'd gone quiet, she'd feared the worst, but he'd returned. Allura held out hope that he was equally fine this time.

She careened around a corner, desperately following the nebulous tug of the bond, currents of Quintessence she could only just sense, but not strongly enough to follow.

She blinked, and suddenly everything that had just been... _wasn't._  The walls of the corridor she'd been running down vanished; the bright lights dimmed. She wasn't even running anymore--and she didn't think she'd _stopped_ , though she swayed as she fought for balance.

She was on her knees not five feet from Shiro, who put a hand down to steady himself as he shook his head to dislodge...

An illusion?

Allura pushed herself to her feet, though it made her head spin and her knees creak.

They were back in the hangar. _Still_ in the hangar, actually. The door Pidge had hacked had sealed behind them; the far door stood open, but the paladins hadn't made it more than twenty feet across the hangar.

"What the _fuck?_ " Pidge hissed, pushing themself up off the floor. They'd landed prone, but otherwise looked to be coming out of the same dream as Allura. She wondered what they'd seen. Had they been exploring a hollow copy of this prison, too?

Groans and muttered curses echoed Pidge's sentiment, but one by one, the paladins began to pick themselves up. Allura looked them over for injuries--or, she started to. Then her mind caught up with her eyes, and her heart dropped.

"Where are the others?"

Lance stood, wavering on his feet for a moment before he steadied enough to help Nyma to hers. "Others?" he asked.

"Half the team's gone," Shiro said. His brow was creased with worry, Sam's silence compounding with the absence of six of their friends. Allura shifted subtly closer to him, not quite close enough to touch, but close enough to catch his attention. He glanced at her, and then away.

Lance and Val looked nearly as worried, though Nyma just looked sour and distracted.

No, sour wasn't the right word. She looked _furious._

"Was that all a _fucking_ illusion?" Nyma hissed. "Are you kidding me?"

"I guess that explains why none of the rescue teams ever made it home," Lance said. "The second you set foot in here, you become a prisoner. I don't know that we could have gotten around it even if we knew what was coming, and considering no one ever knew what to expect..."

Val wrapped her arms around herself. "Yeah? So then how are we free now?"

" _Are_ we free?" Lance leaned in close to her, narrowing his eyes. "How do I know you're the real Val?"

She rolled her eyes and shoved him away. "Please. You think a druid could impersonate _me_?"

Pidge, meanwhile, was staring at Nyma. "They draw on our memories," they said, turning toward Val without taking her eyes off Nyma. "The illusion feeds on itself, and we feed into it. It would have to, if they're keeping all three thousand prisoners trapped inside; no one could actively maintain that many individual illusions. It could probably do a fair impression of us, though it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny."

"You think?" Val tapped her chin. "Then this _could_  be fake."

"I doubt it," Pidge said. "The illusion's probably designed to show us what we want to see... or what we fear. I don't see why it would tell us it's an illusion."

Shiro tensed at the mention of fears, and he turned to Allura, a question in his gaze. She cringed, but shook her head. No, the conversations with Sam hadn't been part of the illusion. Keena really was there.

Disappointment flickered across Shiro's face, but he smothered it quickly. "That's enough speculation. We need to find the others. Akira? Matt? Can any of you hear me?"

"Shiro! Oh, thank god." Matt's voice was breathless, but surprisingly clear. In the illusion, Allura had found only static whenever she tried to call her friends. Perhaps, as Pidge had speculated, the druids couldn't replicate living beings well enough to risk it, at least until the illusion had a chance to set in.

"Where are you?" Shiro asked. "Are the others with you? Akira and Keith--"

"And Hunk and Shay and Meri," Matt said. "Yeah. We all managed to slip out of the illusion one way or another. Apparently there are druids here. We've killed two so far."

"Meri thinks there are at least a dozen more," Akira added. "Which, if that's true, they're going to be coming for us sooner rather than later. Can't imagine they like us busting up the crystal gizmos that maintain their mind-prison."

"Where are you?" Allura asked. "We'll come find you--"

"No." Meri's voice was hard, a note of strain in it that said this place was getting to her. Being around druids again--the second time in less than a month--had to be taking its toll. "We'll finish destroying their amplifiers, and we'll hold the druids off when they come. What we need right now is for someone to take down any other defenses this place might have, and to see if any of the prisoners are in a shape to fight. Twelve druids for twelve of us is not the kind of odds I like."

"We'll split up," Lance said. "I'll go with Pidge, find an access point so they can disable security. But we don't need all six of us."

"I'll come with you," Allura said, drawing her staff and extending the ends. "Just in case you run into trouble. The rest of you, get to the others. Be ready for a fight."

They didn't linger long enough to say more. Allura headed out with Lance and Pidge, silently wishing the others luck and swift passage through Ingav. Given the nature of this place, she didn't expect to meet as much resistance as in a normal prison, but there were druids here, and that was reason enough to worry.

But it wasn't as empty as the illusion had been, and nowhere near as silent. They met two guard patrols before they found an access point--small groups, each time, full of soldiers who had obviously grown complacent with their quiet post here. Allura wondered if the druids had to exempt each of them from the illusion, or if they'd been granted some form of protection.

Even between fights, it wasn't quiet. There was a murmur in the air around them, a rumble that grew louder each time they approached a cell block door. The prisoners of Ingav Prison were awake, some of them for the first time in years. They would be confused, some of them terrified, others angry.

Even if they weren't in peak condition, together they could likely overwhelm the druids.

Allura wasn't sure it was right, turning them loose to fight. Some of them would die before the druids fell. That was inevitable, as Allura doubted most of the prisoners had ever faced a druid before, atrophied muscles or no.

The silence in the back of her mind spurred her to action, though, and she didn't want to chance a long and difficult battle.

There were few sentries on this station, but Pidge shut them all down within moments of accessing the terminal they'd found inside a small, dark office. Alarms and electronic locks went next, followed by comms, at Allura's request. If the druids hadn't already reported back to Zarkon about the paladins breaking out, she didn't want to give them the chance.

"Cell doors are electronic, too," Pidge said, lifting their hands away from the keyboard and glancing back at Allura. "I can open them all at once."

They left it at that, waiting for Allura to give the word or to stop them, and Allura found herself paralyzed, weighing her need to be done with this quickly with her duty to protect these people as best she could. She was aware that, if Pidge knew that Keena had gone to Vindication, they wouldn't hesitate to open those doors. Part of Allura wanted to tell them and be done with it.

She resisted the temptation. This was her decision to make, and her burden to bear, whichever way she decided. "Is there an all-station address system?" she asked. "A way to speak to the prisoners before we release them?"

Pidge turned back to the computer to check, then nodded after a brief moment. "Press this key, and everyone in this prison will hear you."

Allura nodded, gathered her thoughts, and stepped forward. "Prisoners of Ingav," she said, enunciating as she would for an address to the full Coalition--and holding herself as tall as though they were all watching her, searching for signs of weakness. "I am Princess Allura of Altea, paladin of Voltron. As you may have deduced already, you have been held inside an illusion since you were brought here. My friends and I are dismantling that illusion now, and we will release the doors on your cells in just a moment. The fighting is not yet over. If any of you are in fighting condition, we would welcome the aid. For the many of you who are not, I ask that you find somewhere safe to hide. I assure you, we will see every one of you freed and returned home."

Perhaps it was the coward's answer, to push the decision onto the prisoners, none of whom had a complete picture of the situation. Wouldn't it have been worse to make the decision for them, though?

Allura didn't know, but it was done now; at Allura's nod, Pidge opened every cell in the station. The sound in the distance didn't change noticeably, but to Allura's ears it sounded more eager, the anger of captured rebels rising in a tide that would sweep the druids away.

"Let's go," she said. "The others are going to need all the help they can get."

* * *

The druids didn't wait for Meri to destroy the last amplifier.

They didn't even wait for her to figure out how many were left. (Three, at a guess. Perhaps as many as five.)

She supposed, in retrospect, she shouldn't have expected them to. Their illusions were breaking down. The prisoners were loose. What good would it do them now to remain holed up wherever it was they gathered to keep the illusion running?

All she could say for sure was that the druids had decided to go on the offensive. They were waiting when Meri brought her team into the next crystal array. Meri sensed them before she saw them, an ominous presence hanging in the air around her, hands reaching for the energy she needed, the Quintessence that would replace what she'd used up in the travel.

She spun, unleashing a bolt of lightning and only afterwards recognizing the cloaks and masks of the druids.

Hunk shouted a warning; Akira swore and fell back beside Matt and Hunk, the three of them standing back-to-back. They left a spot open for Meri, but she couldn't retreat from this; instead, she charged.

The room dissolved in a splash of black, and reappeared with lighting searing her eyes.

It was aimed poorly--no, it was aimed at someone else. Keith and Shay, fighting together in the thick of the druids, Keith the sword, Shay the shield. They were more mobile than the other three, who only moved when a druid ventured too close, and only long enough for Matt to catch them in the corner of his eye and close his hand into a fist.

Two druids burned from the inside out before they learned to be more wary.

Meri bled a third dry, drinking in his Quintessence, letting it merge with her own. The magic sang to her, coaxing her to let loose and reign destruction on all who stood against her.

She resisted, forcing her eyes to find her friends in the chaos, though it cost her her focus and left her open to counterattacks from the quickest of the druids.

They stung, she would admit. Lightning like bees, pricking at her concentration, annoying her more than anything, but enough of them could bring her down. For now, they hardly made a dent in the well of Quintessence inside her.

Two more druids went down, one to Keith's sword, another to Meri's bare hands. How many remained? Six? No, eight. No--it was impossible to track them, the way they were all flitting about the room, darting away from the ember of Matt's gathering Quintessence before it burst into flame, keeping ahead of Akira and Hunk's guns, of Keith's sword, of Meri's lightning.

They weren't always fast enough, but the constant motion and identical garb made a dozen or less feel like at least twenty.

When the door opened, hardly a whisper on oiled tracks, Meri spun toward it, lightning springing to her fingertips.

She recognized Nyma and Val first by the echo of her own Quintessence in them--a thread of Blue connecting them as one--and extinguished her magic before it could escape her.

Shiro charged into the thickest knot of dark fabric and crackling Quintessence, driving off two of the five druids who had been hounding Keith and Shay on and off for the last five minutes. The three of them fell into a new rhythm, Val and Nyma forming a third unit just inside the door.

And still the druids were playing with them. The ones Meri faced, one-on-one, might not have been. She could absorb their attacks better than the others, and she hit harder than anyone but Matt in return.

But she was one person, and as Shiro's daggers scored a hit on one of the surviving druids, the tone in the room shifted. It was no longer a game, a dance of phantoms around huddled mortals.

It was a hunt, and the paladins weren't the only targets.

There was no command given, no signal Meri could see, but as one, the druids vanished, black smoke choking the air in the amplifier chamber for long seconds before Meri realized the truth: the druids weren't coming back.

"They're going for the prisoners," she said, whirling toward the door. Without waiting to see if the others understood, Meri flickered, throwing herself to the other side of the cell block.

The prisoners here were still disoriented, a handful motionless, the rest no more aware than Hunk and Shay had been before Meri had snipped the last cords of the illusion shrouding their minds. The druids might have given up on the illusion, but it had a momentum of its own, and this close to an intact amplifier, it wasn't so easy to shake off.

A solitary druid stood in the center of the cell block, surrounded by open doors and helpless prisoners. Meri didn't know where the others had gone, but she knew what this one planned to do, and as he raised his arms straight out to either side, Meri brought hers up in a cutting motion, letting all her helpless fury pour out of her.

Their attacks landed at the same moment. The druid, all his attention on causing the most damage possible, too slow to flicker away. Smoke had just begun to gather in the shadows of his cloak when Meri's lightning speared him through--not draining him, this time, but burning a hole straight through his chest.

The druid's lightning died a moment later, but not fast enough to stop the scent of charred flesh from filling the air. Not just the druids'; screams came from several of the cells nearest his corpse. Motionless bodies lay in others. Eight prisoners, perhaps ten. A drop in the bucket of this prison--but they were dead now, when freedom was finally within their reach.

Seething, Meri flung herself out into the hall, flickering to the entrance of the next cell block, and the next, searching for where the remaining druids had gone. If all they cared about was killing as many prisoners as possible before they were caught, there would be no stopping them.

In the distance, she heard the cries of horror as the others stumbled upon the scene in the first cell block. Shiro ordered them to split up, to find the druids and stop them before they murdered any more prisoners.

They wouldn't be fast enough.

Meri stopped herself from chasing after the druids, though she wanted nothing more than to look them in the eyes as they died, alone, afraid, and in pain--just like every one of their countless victims.

On instinct, Meri returned to the amplifier. A few elements around the edges of the room had been damaged in the fighting; the mount for the central crystal was scorched where a bolt of lightning had overloaded the circuit.

But the crystal was intact, and the amplifier still functional, if running below capacity.

Meri pressed her hands to the crystal's surface. No longer icy cold, it seared her hands, and she had to fight not to pull them away. This crystal, the mechanism it fed into, was connected to the druids. They'd used it for years, poured their Quintessence, their very _souls_  into it, and into the illusion. They could feel when the amplifiers fell.

Well, a bridge went both ways, and Meri would make sure they felt what she was about to dish out.

She gathered the Quintessence raging inside her, the bounty of half a dozen amplifiers, of the druids and soldiers she'd drained of their very life. Enough Quintessence to consume her, if she lost control.

Enough Quintessence to kill a man, a hundred times over.

She poured it all into the crystal, reaching out with her mind to trace the pathways that connected the grand mechanism of Ingav Prison. Crystals, druids, even the conduit inside the walls. It was all connected.

And it all _burned._

She heard the screams, felt them in the pit of her stomach. She reveled in them.

They made her want to be sick.

It lasted only a moment, a glorious, horrifying moment during which Meri's mind expanded to fill the entire station. She held thousands of lives in her hands, and could have snuffed them out with a thought.

She stepped back from the crystal, now a blackened husk that bled jet black smoke.

Silence filled Ingav once more.

* * *

It took hours to shuttle all the prisoners away from Ingav, and the paladins left most of the work to others. The Guard and the Coalition forces had much larger ships in their fleets, capable of carrying hundreds, rather than only a few dozen, and once Voltron had put in an appearance at the battle raging near their current encampment, the Imperial forces bled away into the night.

It gave them time to breathe, if nothing else.

Many of the prisoners needed medical care--for wounds suffered in the druids' last rampage, or for the neglect they'd suffered before. More than a hundred corpses were retrieved along with the survivors. Some had died in the battle, but others were dead even before the paladins arrived--dead of starvation, of illness, of cold.

The druids liked to play with their food, may have even found some information of use in the minds they bent to their whims. But ultimately, the prisoners were expendable, and if they didn't rouse enough to eat and drink when the druids allowed it, if they wasted away while their minds lived a lie, the druids didn't care.

Shiro wasn't certain they even noticed. Some of the bodies seemed to have been dead for some time, as though left to rot until a guard happened to notice the smell.

Shiro was glad to leave Ingav behind, and he found it difficult to be proud of what they'd done. All he felt was tired, along with a lingering dread.

Sam hadn't spoken again since Shiro had slipped free of the illusion. He feared what that might mean, and what it would do to the Holts to hear the story. But he owed them the truth, with all its uncertainties.

Meri and Akira were taking turns fussing over each other--Akira urging Meri to eat, and to sleep, Meri pointedly telling the entire team that the druids had wanted something with Akira specifically. Shiro wished he could agree with Akira, that they couldn't possibly know what he was, or what Red had done, but it was hard to believe that.

They'd have to be more careful in the future.

For now, at least they'd succeeded. Ingav was no more. Three thousand rebel soldiers were on the mend. Karen and Thace were on their way back, ahead of a congress of rebel leaders--however many could be reached. There was some sort of communication blockade in the Greater Chettok that made it difficult to communicate except through official channels.

That would have to be their first target. The rebellion here was massive, but scattered. If they could bring them all together, unite them with the Coalition forces... 

They would be a force like nothing Zarkon had ever seen, an armada to rival his own.

But that was a thought for tomorrow.

He stopped Pidge and Matt as they began to disperse, the day's work done, food and rest calling. "Something happened while we were at Ingav," he said, floundering as he searched for a way to say it. Keith had stopped nearby, hovering on the edge of the conversation, and Shiro didn't wave him away. "Your dad reached out to me. Allura heard him, too, so we're confident it wasn't part of the illusion."

"What did he say?" Pidge asked.

Matt was silent, watching Shiro with dread pulling at his lips.

"Keena's there," Shiro said. Rip the band-aid off. Weather the moment of horror, and get them pointed toward constructive action. It was the best he could offer them, but even he wasn't prepared for Keith to be the one who took the news hardest of all.

"I'm gonna kill her."

Halfway across the bridge as he was, Keith's voice carried, dragging every eye his way. Most of the team had already left, all except Allura, who'd stayed behind to speak with Coran, and Nyma, who'd sat fuming in the blue paladins' chair through the entire debrief and only now seemed to realize it was over.

Matt and Pidge, too, turned toward Keith, somewhat surprised but quickly latching onto his anger. He stared back at them, teeth slightly bared, ears quivering with the effort of not folding back. "I'm gonna _vrekking_  kill her."

"Not if I find her first," Pidge muttered. They rounded on Shiro, a blaze of fury in their eyes. "Can you call Val back here? I need her to take me to the lab."

Shiro opened his mouth, knowing he was opening himself up to a tongue-lashing--but Matt slipped into his silence with a hand on Pidge's arm.

"Val isn't going anywhere until she's gotten a few hours of sleep. That illusion took a lot out of all of us." He _sounded_ tired, tired and old, like this news about Keena and Sam had brought out a weariness that had been fermenting for years, and the look he gave Pidge made them flinch. Across the bridge, Nyma stalled in her bid for a quiet exit, her shoulders hitching toward her ears. Shiro thought of the version of Ingav he'd been shown, with glimpses of the Arena seemingly tucked in every corner. It had stopped one step short of actually shoving him back out onto those sands, but he couldn't help wondering whether that was only because he'd been fixated on Sam.

Matt squeezed Pidge's arm once, then turned to fix Keith with a stare.

"And this isn't your fault."

Keith recoiled, his ears folding back in a flash of vulnerability before the anger returned as though to justify his defensive posture. "I never said it was."

"Good." Matt nodded once, his careful composure wavering for a moment as he caught Shiro's eye, then hastily looked away. "Just as long as we're clear."

Pidge waited out the awkward silence for five seconds, then abruptly turned for the door. "I'm going to find Val. I'll let her get some sleep," they said before anyone could interject. "I just want to make sure she knows what's happening. We'll make a plan and then--"

A ringing in Shiro's ears drowned out the rest of Pidge's sentence. Twenty feet away, Allura broke off her conversation with Coran to stand up straight, her eyes staring into the distance.

Shiro didn't remember falling, but suddenly he was on his knees, Matt and Pidge at either side and Keith rushing over to help.

 _Sam,_  Shiro called, stretching through the half-open bond into the silence on the other end. A fear he hadn't dared acknowledge roared into that silence, compounding with every heartbeat that passed without a response. _Sam, if you're there, please say something. I need to know you're okay._

_I'm here._

Shiro choked on a sob, reaching out blindly for Matt. "It's him," Shiro gasped. "It's your dad."

"Oh, thank god." Matt slumped, folding around Shiro--his arms around Shiro's neck, his face buried in Shiro's hair. Shiro looped one arm around Matt's thighs, pulling him close, while Pidge squeezed the other so tight he knew it was going to leave bruises.

Just now, he didn't care.

_Sam, what happened?_

_She put me under... Rax and Rolo tell me it's been hours, but I'm just coming back to myself. It wasn't like when they have me pilot their lion; I didn't get forced out. More like shoved down, like whatever they did to Zuza._

_Did Keena do anything to you?_

Sam was quiet for a moment. _I don't think so. I'm not sure what she wanted. Rolo says she was poking around, hooking me up to machines, pulling up files on everything from the thing they've put on us to control us to the mechanism by which they bonded us to those lions. Then she tossed me back in the cell and left the lab._

 _She'll be back,_  Shiro warned him. _She might just be planning things for now, but sooner or later she_ is  _going to act._

_I know. But not today._

Not today. That was an optimistic way of looking at it. But it was the truth. _Okay. I'll tell your family. Stay safe._

_I'll try._

Pidge hardly stayed long enough to hear the news. The knowledge that Sam was alive had cooled their panic, enough that Shiro figured almost even odds they'd _actually_  be able to sleep, but they still wanted to go and see for themself. Shiro couldn't fault them for that.

Matt lingered, helping Shiro to his feet and then clinging to him, shivering, shuddering, Keith hovering just out of arm's reach.

"I'm going to find her," Keith said. "Before she has a chance to do whatever she's planning."

Matt took a deep breath, enough that when he pulled back, he'd managed a smile. He reached out for Keith, pulling him into an embrace and ruffling his hair. "I'll help." He looked back at Shiro, a fire in his eyes despite the tears. "We're going to stop her. Whatever it takes."


	37. The Seeker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins successfully liberated Ingav Prison, marking their first major step forward in the Chettok Campaign, but the staff at the prison targeted Akira specifically, which has the paladins worried. For now, though, the only thing they can do is press forward.

Akira woke to a shadow looming over him.

He wasn't sure what had woken him, some sound or Red's instincts, and he didn't have time to ponder it. He lurched back, swiveling at the same time. He kicked out with his feet, sending the shadow flying. They hit the far wall with a thud as Akira darted his hand under his pillow and grabbed the knife hidden there.

Part of him still wished he'd opted for a gun, though he'd tried it, and it had been too bulky for comfort. And who wanted to fumble with a safety with sleep-numbed fingers? Much easier to rip off a sheathe and fling it aside as you leaped on your attacker.

Red was wide awake and spoiling for a fight, but she didn't try to take control of the fight. She was roaring, somewhere in his head or in her Heart, rousing the other Lions so they could warn the paladins of the danger. Another assassin.

They were getting better at this.

The assassin caught Akira's wrist as he pounced on them, halting the dagger's blade inches from their chest. Dressed in dark clothes as they were, a featureless mask drawn over their face, or perhaps projected there, it was impossible to make out any distinguishing features. They were skinny, long-limbed and lithe, so probably not Galra. The last two assassins hadn't been Galra either. Didn't mean they weren't working for the Empire.

The assassin squirmed out from under Akira, as fluid as a snake--and just as quick, too. They lashed out with one foot, striking Akira's hand and knocking his knife away. He lunged after it, but in the darkness, he couldn't tell where it had gone, and the assassin wasn't letting up. They rolled, the assassin landing atop Akira, pinning one arm with their knee and grabbing the other wrist, leaving one hand free to raise a--what was it? He couldn't tell, but knife, gun, or syringe, he had no doubt it would kill him in a matter of seconds.

It was difficult to step back with the adrenaline surging through his veins, but Red had finished alerting the team to what was happening, and she was pressing at the back of his mind. He yielded to her push, let her bolster his strength enough to buck off the assassin.

Something hit the ground with a soft _thwip_ , and the assassin dodged back, melting silently into the shadows at the foot of the bed.

 _Screw that_ , Akira thought, and reached out with senses not entirely his own. The Lions weren't directly connected to castle systems, but they could manipulate them easily enough when they wanted to. On an intellectual level, Akira understood it to occur through a complicated series of transmissions and subroutines executed through the imitation lion bond that attuned the castle to the Lions' needs.

In the moment, it felt much simpler than that. He wanted light, and then he had light.

The assassin hissed, flinching away from the sudden glare. It stung Akira's eyes, too, but he'd been ready for it, his eyes downcast, and he spotted both his dagger and the assassin's weapon, a slender, curved spike, on the ground nearby. The spike was closer, and his hand closed around it just as the assassin recovered and fell atop him.

Akira twisted, swinging the spike in a wide arc, and met the familiar resistance of flesh, there for an instant, then melting away as the spike sank in up to its hilt.

The door hissed open, and Takashi charged in, Matt just behind him--limping visibly, but clutching his pistol in one hand while a flame ignited inside the other loose fist.

Akira yanked the spike free, grabbed his dagger for good measure, and hauled himself up on the bedside table.

It was only now that he began to shake, whole-body shivers that left him wondering if someone had turned off the heat in his room while he was asleep. More paladins crowded in while Shiro knelt beside the assassin, checking their pulse. Akira didn't need to ask to know that they were already dead.

When the enemy had things like cryopods at their disposal, you couldn't risk a slow death.

"Sorry," Akira said. "I know you wanted to question the next one."

Takashi shot him an exasperated look. "You could have died, Akira. I think we can forgive you for not taking your attacker alive."

He _had_ wanted answers, though. Akira could see it. One of Kolivan’s few remaining spies had confirmed for them, shortly after Ingav, that Keena had told Zarkon and Keturah about Akira's fusion with Red. She'd offered it in trade for some favor from Keturah the spy didn't know the details of--though given what they'd learned from Sam, the logical answer was that the favor had been access to Vindication and the pilots of Zarkon's Lions.

Really, that was all Akira needed to know. Zarkon and Haggar knew he was tied to Red. Kill one and you killed the other. And when "the other" was an irreplaceable sentient robot, that made Akira the single easiest way to bring down Voltron once and for all.

It had been two months since Ingav--frantic months, with never enough rest and far too much to do--and this was the third assassination attempt. (Takashi would call it four, because he refused to accept that the so-called poison in the punch at the celebration on Vegrand had been an accident, but Akira refused to be that paranoid.) The last assassin had made it as far as the ballroom where they were holding a celebration--a chaotic, public space with comparatively little security and a lot of moving pieces.

Now they'd made it not only into the residential areas, but they'd either entered when security was at its height or they'd managed to stay hidden for three days since the castle-ship had last set down on allied ground.

"Are you okay?" Matt asked. "What happened?"

"I'm fine." Akira searched around for his knife's sheathe, then slid it back under his pillow. "Woke up and someone was in here. We fought. I won."

From the whispering at the doorway, the entire team must have gathered by now, all of them buzzing with adrenaline. Well, they weren't going to take all that energy out on Akira.

"Can someone do me a favor and deal with the body?" he asked, cutting off Meri, who had started to ask another question. "And here." He shoved the curved pick-thing at Takashi, who almost dropped it. "There's probably poison on there, so... be careful, I guess."

"You should go to the infirmary," Meri said. "If he even nicked you--"

"If he even nicked me, I'd already be dead." Akira didn't mean to be so blunt about it, but he'd had a lot of late nights lately, handling things with the Guard even when the paladins didn't need him. It was two in the morning, and he was tired.

Meri shouldered her way past Takashi and Matt, reaching out for Akira. "Come on, Akira. Now's not the time to be acting all tough."

"No, now's the time to be _sleeping._  Tomorrow's a big day, if you remember."

The reminder turned the anxious energy into something bigger--not restlessness after a threat averted, but the fear that preceded a massive risk--but Akira was quite frankly too tired to care. He chased the team out of his room, grateful when Allura hefted the assassin's corpse, and shut the door behind them. There was a small red stain on the floor, the lingering stench of sulfur that must have come from the alien blood, but Akira extinguished the light with a distracted thought and collapsed into his bed.

His last thought, or maybe Red's, as sleep claimed them both, was that he hated being weak.

* * *

Shiro didn't sleep for the rest of the night, though he made an honest effort. Akira had been right about today being a big day, and Shiro certainly would have liked to be at the top of his game.

Unfortunately, when the Empire wanted your brother dead, it got harder to unwind enough to rest.

Matt, at least, seemed to have fallen asleep after a restless hour or so, and Shiro kept still so as not to disturb him. He dozed for a bit just before his alarm went off, but he was still groggy as he got up and began to prepare for the day.

His fatigue vanished as soon as he stepped onto the bridge. Coran was already there, along with today's crew, the holomap in the center glowing with the Vkullor's current location. It was just where they'd expected it to be, considering its recent trajectory. Too close to Coalition space for comfort, and headed straight for an inhabited world.

"Are we ready?" Shiro asked.

"As ready as we can be with the Klennahn Cannon still offline," Coran said. With a few keystrokes, he brought up another beacon on the map: the decoy they'd built over the last week from the scraps of downed ships and the largest cloaking unit Pidge, Hunk, Matt, and Coran could manage in short spurts between battles.

Longer spurts lately. Either they were finally starting to wear Zarkon down, or he was massing his troops for something big.

"Beyond here is empty space and barren worlds for long enough that it's not worth worrying about," Coran said. "You'll just have to lure that thing far enough for it to notice the 'rival' encroaching on its territory."

Shiro looked up as the first of the paladins began to trickle in. This still felt like too much guesswork to him, but they needed a few more days on the Klenahn Cannon, and the Coalition might not have that long. They were just lucky the Vkullor had veered away from the first target they'd suspected. They could have been in this position a month ago.

They were here now, though. It had been close. Even as they began construction on the decoy Vkullor, Shiro had held out hope that Aransha would finish repairs on the cannon. Unfortunately, that wasn't meant to be.

"All right," he said, once everyone was gathered. "You all know how this goes. Keith, Matt, and Akira will come with Allura and I to divert the Vkullor--"

"I _really_ think it should be all of us," Pidge said. "What if this goes wrong? We don't even know how close you'll have to get the Vkullor to the decoy to catch its attention."

Allura shook her head. "Having more of you there isn't going to change that, and the fleet simply can't afford to be down all five Lions."

Shiro flashed an image on the screen, marking a location on the holomap at the same moment. "We've located another relay station. The rest of you are going to bring it down today."

This part of the briefing was straightforward. They'd first encountered the relay stations shortly after Ingav. They were purportedly a way to boost long-range communication across the Greater Chettok and beyond, but everyone knew it was really a way to smother dissent and identify rebellions before they sprang up. Relay stations were the main reason the resistance in Chettok was so fragmented. They'd presented a united front, once, but as the Empire moved in and solidified their hold, it had been too easy to follow the chain of communication from one base to another.

With each relay they took out, they freed up whole systems to join the fight in earnest, sending some fighters to the front lines and leaving others behind to watch for retaliation.

The team listened intently anyway. However routine this was, however routine the last _two months_  had been, there was always a chance that things would go wrong. They all wanted to go into every mission prepared.

Lance and Meri both put up a bit more fuss before they relented and headed to their lions, and that just left the five of them who were gunning for the Vkullor.

Akira looked tired. More than tired. He'd been distant for weeks, and Shiro didn't think it was just because of the war, or even the assassinations. Half the time, he went out of the way to avoid Shiro, and the rest of the time it was like they were attached at the hip. Shiro sometimes caught Akira watching him like _Shiro_ was the one with a target on his back, like he might wake up one day and find Shiro dead in his room.

Shiro wanted to talk about whatever it was that was bothering Akira, but there never seemed to be a good time. In the midst of baiting a Vkullor least of all.

Whatever the issue was, it hadn't affected his ability to do his job, and Shiro was just going to have to learn to live with it.

"No point in wasting time," he finally said. "We'll meet at the rendezvous point in five."

It was a silent walk down to Black's hangar, Allura as tense as Shiro and for all the same reasons. Neither of them wanted to be going up against the Vkullor, but they were glad it was them instead of another Lion. Lance, Meri, and Pidge might not like it, but it had been an easy choice. Black and Red were faster than the rest of the Lions. That didn't mean this would be _safe_ , but safer for them than for the others.

Didn't make it any easier to face down the wormhole Coran opened for them that would take them to the vicinity of the Vkullor, or to plunge in, knowing what awaited them on the other side.

"Check your teludav," Allura ordered when they emerged. "We're _not_  going to get ourselves stranded within range of a rampaging Vkullor."

She was already checking theirs, verifying the level of stored Quintessence. They'd pumped the lions as full of it as they could, hoping to give each of them a good two dozen wormholes, if not more. They couldn't rely on the castle out here, and they couldn't be sure the lions would have enough power to outlast the chase, when they weren't originally conceived with a teludav at all. That had been Pidge's idea, back near the start of the war, and until today, they'd typically only managed one or two charges before the lions needed to recuperate back on the castle-ship.

Everything looked good, though, and Shiro trusted Allura in this more than he trusted himself. Akira gave a similar okay, which Shiro could only assume was drawing on Red's familiarity with her own systems.

Allura took a deep breath, turning her focus inward for a moment, finding Shiro, and steadying them both. They sensed the others doing the same and, somewhere in the far distance, a glimmer of the rest of the team--alert and wary, but confident as they began their own mission.

Far more confident than any of them here.

"Let's go," Shiro said.

They split off, following the plan they'd worked out over the course of the last week. They'd run simulated passes at the decoy Vkullor under construction, using the Vkullor data they'd gleaned from the archives and their own encounters to work out how far apart they had to be, how quickly they had to pull its attention away from the other lion.

The plan was simple, in theory. One of them turned on their cloak just long enough to draw the Vkullor into a hunt, then disabled it and avoided the beast like mad while the other lion surged ahead and flashed its cloak. Then, a wormhole for the first lion, leapfrogging ahead of Vkullor and lion both, and the process repeated.

It was an incredibly fine line they walked--step in too late, and someone was going to die; rush the rhythm, and they could run out of wormholes before they got far enough to set the Vkullor on their chosen path.

Shiro didn't think that would happen, but it had made him and Allura think long and hard about bringing someone else along on this mission. But the added risk to another pair of paladins was just too great to justify it. He hoped they'd made the right call.

Red, as the faster lion, shot ahead, settling into position for the second leg of the chase while Shiro brought Black around the Vkullor in a wide orbit. The first step was to gauge how far they could go and still have their cloak draw its attention, so they kept far back, the Red Lion fading to a speck and then vanishing altogether, while the Vkullor shrunk to a slip the size of Shiro's little finger in the distance, then smaller still, until Black's strongest zoom could provide only enough detail to tell which direction it was facing. He pulled back until he could only just see it, waited for Matt to radio with the green light, then flipped the switch on his cloak.

They were half a solar system away from the Vkullor when he did, but it flickered red-green-dark less than a second later, then turned and began its charge.

"It sees us," Shiro said, dread pooling in his gut as he pushed Black's engines to the max. He couldn't keep ahead of the Vkullor, but he would delay it catching up as long as he possibly could. "We're at twenty AU. Go to forty, and warn Coran before you engage. You won't be able to see it at that range, so you'll need him to tell you if it took the bait."

"Copy that," Matt said. "Don't let that thing catch you before we get a turn in the hot seat."

Shiro smiled, tight and nervous, and leaned a little harder on the throttle. "Only you would _want_  to play tag with a Vkullor."

" _Carpe diem,_ baby! Or at least _carpe_  giant space dragon. Gotta stock up on the good stories for our future children, after all. I don't know about you, but I am _definitely_  going to be a cool dad."

"Only if you don't die first," Shiro said. "Now shut up and fly."

* * *

It was remarkable, Lance thought, how many things in this war had become routine. New planet every day? Well, that was only to be expected. Fighting off a couple hundred fighters on the way to the target? Total snore. Taking on a relay station that wasn't even that much of a challenge while some of his closest friends played Chicken with a Vkullor?

Well, that one was relatively new, but it was hardly the first time he'd had to carry on like normal when someone else had drawn a particularly risky job.

Now that they had the support of a large number of rebel cells in the Greater Chettok, the war had become less defensive. The paladins and their fleet didn't need to hold the line against attacks quite so much, and instead could spare the paladins and occasionally even the Guard to launch preemptive strikes against Imperial fleets massing nearby, liberate prisons (thankfully none as large or well-guarded as Ingav), and shatter occupations holding local worlds hostage. It wasn't so very different from what they'd been doing before Chettok, so it felt... well, routine.

"Not to get too cocky," Lance said, twisting to give Nyma a better shot at the heavy artillery backing up the fighters at this relay. "But I don't think they have anything for us."

Pidge grinned. "Of course they don't. We're wiping the floor with them on too many fronts. They can't afford to send reinforcements to every battle anymore, not since the Migration cut off their crystal supply."

It had been one of the highs of the last two months, and Lance had felt the shift in Zarkon's strategy. The five Balmera still producing crystals in large quantities had been difficult fights, sometimes more of a siege than the usual blitz attack. Lance had only heard a handful of details of the fights, but he knew that the Migration had taken longer to prepare for each of them than they did for most strikes.

Their caution paid off, obviously. Two weeks ago, they'd successfully recaptured the last target, and the entire Coalition had celebrated. As much as they could when they were expecting an attack at any moment.

The Migration hadn't slowed, either. Yes, Zarkon now hardly had enough crystals to maintain his fleet, and definitely couldn't replace the warships and experimental weapons they'd encountered and destroyed in the last few weeks, but he still had dozens of Balmera under his control. He would be pushing them harder than ever.

Akira had diverted more of the Guard to help, but they had so much forward momentum by now that it was difficult to spare any amount of firepower.

The lions broke through the last line of defenses a moment later, the rubble of the last fighters falling away behind them as they swept into open air. The relay station loomed ahead. It looked identical to the others: a small steel brick in the middle of nowhere, nondescript but devastating to the rebellion--and to anyone even slightly critical of the Imperial occupation of the Greater Chettok.

"Looks like we're in the clear," Val said. "I'm not picking up any other defenses."

The Yellow Lion surged ahead. "Then let us make haste," Shay said. "I do not like to leave the others to face the Vkullor alone."

* * *

Rax floated in darkness, wrapped up in the cold, watchful silence of Dark Yellow's mind. Even from the far end of the lab, he could feel her. It unnerved him, all the more because the silence felt so unnatural. The records said they had use the soul of a Balmera to create their beast.

So where was the song? Had they stolen her voice, when they twisted her into this form, or had she gone quiet of her own accord?

Had she lost her people before she was taken for this atrocity, or had she been ripped away from them, knowing they would die without her?

 _I know you're there,_ he thought, singing into the endless void. With no one here to answer his song, he himself had fallen silent, and he'd grown rusty. His melodies were stilted and hollow, and he knew they didn't convey the half of what he meant them to.

He supposed he understood the Balmera's silence a little bit, after all.

She _was_  still alive, though, and he thought she was watching him.

So he sang. And then, a whisper.

A single note, tremulous and unsure.

Rax harmonized with the voice of the Balmera, bolstering it, sharing her pain. She was aware of what had happened to her only in the vaguest of senses; her world was pain and darkness and isolation, isolation like she'd never known. There had always been Balmerans on her, living on her surface and within her veins, singing to her, learning from her.

She wasn't meant to be alone.

 _You're not_ , Rax told her, singing to her, his heart breaking for what the Empire had done to her, to them all. _I'm here. We can help each other._

She did not see how.

Rax was ripped from the darkness before he could explain, his stomach lurching as someone moved him, shook him. His eyes flew open to the sight of Sam, his face pinched and his hand curled around Rax's elbow. Beyond him, Rolo had shifted, but Rax hadn't been able to keep up with the infection festering at the point where the druids' prosthetic met his flesh, and he winced.

Zuza was already standing, spine straight, arms stiff at her side, eyes fixed on the door.

Rax's heart fell. "They're taking us out again?"

"Probably," Sam said. "Be ready for anything."

Rax thought of the Balmera, a timid counterpoint to the rage of the robeast in the corner of his mind. They weren't ready; they couldn't be.

But they would survive, as they always did.

* * *

_You might have company soon._

Sam's voice shattered Shiro's concentration for a moment, a stark reminder that there was a wider universe out there, beyond the Vkullor and the two Lions it was hunting.

 _Company?_  he asked, swiveling to take off in a new direction. The Vkullor was still a few minutes from catching up, but it could attack at range, and Shiro didn't want to give it a clear shot.

_I can't be sure, but they're taking all of us somewhere. I assume it's to the Lions._

Shiro cursed, then signaled to Keith and Matt that he was ready for them to divert. They'd each burned through half of their wormhole charges by now, gradually increasing the distance until they found the limit of the Vkullor's senses. For a cloak only large enough to cover a Lion, that limit seemed to be around two hundred and fifty AU--farther than Shiro had thought, but somehow not as far as he'd hoped.

The cloak on their decoy was much stronger than their own, personal cloaks; hopefully the Vkullor would be able to sense it from that much farther away.

 _I could be wrong,_  Sam said. Shiro wondered if he was confused by Shiro's silence, or if he could sense his tension, his intense focus. _They could be taking us for more tests. I thought you should know, just in case._

 _We appreciate it,_  Allura assured him.

The Vkullor rippled, the reds and greens that glowed in its scales flaring bright a moment before it veered away.

"You've got it," Shiro called to the Red Lion. _Has anything else happened?_ he asked Sam. _What's Keena been doing?_

_Not much. Actually, I'm not sure she's even still here. I can't quite reach the hangars, but I haven't seen her in the main structure in more than a week._

That, at least, was something of a relief. Keena seemed to be splitting her time between the Vindication lab and the center of the Empire. She'd claimed she meant to put herself in a position to take over the Empire after Zarkon and Haggar fell, and the spy reporting back on her activities so far had no reason to doubt that claim. Whatever she had done to Sam--something she seemed to return periodically to check up on--it appeared to be a personal project, secondary to usurping the throne.

Allura opened a wormhole for them, and Shiro plunged in. The biggest upside of the long reach of the Vkullor's senses was that it kept both lions out of the dead zone that surrounded the beast. They always had communication with each other, but they usually had a line to the castle, as well, where Coran was monitoring the Vkullor's position for them using the paired trackers.

Between the wormholes and the chase, they'd managed to lead the Vkullor nearly half a light year off course already--only a matter of hours' delay, should the Vkullor decide to turn around and head for its original target once more, but a significant distance toward where they'd built the decoy. The decoy wasn't terribly mobile, but they'd equipped it with its own teludav. Once they'd attracted the Vkullor's attention and knew how far away it would sense them from, they could wormhole ahead of it every couple of hours. They'd have to swap out the staff frequently enough for it to be a burden on Coalition resources, but Aransha had her team working double time to finish the Klennahn Cannon.

A week from now, with luck, they would be ready to take the Vkullor down for good.

While they waited for Keith and Matt to give the signal, Allura called Coran and passed along Sam's message. The fleet was Zarkon's most likely target, though there was always a chance he'd decide to target civilians instead. He'd been doing that lately at least as much as he'd attacked the Coalition. Choosing his battles to draw the paladins away from their allies? Or attacking out of spite, lashing out in retribution for the fact that the Coalition had reclaimed half of his newest prizes in a matter of weeks?

 _Shiro?_  Sam asked. _They're definitely taking us to the Lions. I'll let you know if I figure out where they're sending us._

_Understood. Be careful out there._

Sam chuckled. Shiro knew it was pointless to warn caution. Not much could hurt Sam that he had any power to avoid. But it made Shiro feel better to say it, like Sam was an ally on a mission, and not a prisoner of war kept somewhere out of the paladins' sight until he was dragged out to fight Zarkon's battles, hostage and weapon all in one.

"Coran," Shiro said. "Call the others, see if they can break away from their mission anytime soon. I don't know how much longer this is going to take, but we can't risk leaving the Vkullor to just turn around and head back the way it came."

Coran's voice was somber as he answered with acknowledgement, then ended the call to begin preparations for the coming battle.

All too soon, Keith gave the signal. Shiro flipped on their cloak and took off. He could almost imagine he felt the weight of the Vkullor's attention swing his way, and it didn't matter that it was ten times as far away as Earth was from Kerberos. He felt it breathing down his neck, and his pulse ticked higher, driving out thoughts of Dark Voltron and the battle waiting for him when he was finished here.

Survival was his only concern now.

* * *

Pidge was sick of playing the part of the distraction, however necessary they knew it was--now of all times. The Black and Red Lions were still dealing with the Vkullor when Dark Voltron arrived. Pidge and the others had returned from the heap of scrap that had been a relay station just a few minutes prior.

The battle had already started, a throng of fighters and a handful of warships arrayed in the distance to pelt the Coalition fleet. It wasn't even a particularly large force, not that Zarkon had been sending a lot of big forces to meet them lately. His strategy usually boiled down to one of two things: strike at civilians to draw the enemy out of its comfort zone and try to catch them in an ambush, or dart a sneak attack with a weak force, picking off as many ships as possible before they were forced to retreat. Zarkon still won out in sheer numbers, after all. He could afford to lose a few weak fleets to soften up the Coalition in preparation for something bigger.

Still, it meant that Pidge didn't have to stress too much about this battle. Their only real concern was Dark Voltron, and only because the paladins were down two Lions.

As always when they fought Zarkon's Lions, they itched to turn this stalemate into a rescue attempt. Their father was _so_  close, and the paladins outclassed Zarkon by such a margin, that they  _knew_  they could have done it.

Except that it would leave them vulnerable, and that Zarkon would react the second they breached the cockpit to try to drag their father out. They might have been able to subdue him long enough to get him back to the castle and into a pod while they figured out how to disable the master key device. With Val's help they might have.

But there was a very real chance that before they had the time, Zarkon would simply call a retreat and have the other lions tow Dark Green through a wormhole with a couple of new captives as prizes.

That was how it always went, for months and months as the Chettok Campaign wore on. It was never the right time to mount a rescue, as Zarkon only brought his lions into the largest, most hectic battles, and always pulled them out before things got too bad. They'd managed to plant a handful of trackers on one lion or another, but they always went dark as soon as the lions entered the wormhole.

They had a dark zone around their lab. It made sense, of course, and so long as the lions kept wormholing to a point inside that perimeter, tracking them was utterly useless.

The lab was beyond their reach, even now. Their only chance was to disable the lions on the field of battle.

Val, of course, sensed the direction of their thoughts. Perhaps that was why she claimed Dark Red as an additional target, leaving Hunk and Shay to tackle Dark Blue and Dark Yellow while Lance, Meri, and Nyma clashed with Zarkon himself. There wasn't time to dream up a theoretical rescue when the attacks kept coming from both sides.

To make matters worse, they didn't have the Voltron bond today. Maintaining it across massive distances was possible, but only in short bursts; after that, it became a drain on focus that the others couldn't afford in the middle of a dance with the Vkullor. Pidge and Val were just Pidge and Val right now, and Green was only one Lion: fast, and clever, and able to absorb hits on her shield and turn them back on the enemy, but too slow to outfly two Lions at once.

It was okay, they told themself. They were taking a little bit of a beating here, but they could weather it. The rest of the fleet would chew through Zarkon's forces in twenty minutes, and Zarkon would call a retreat, like usual. All Pidge and Val had to do in the mean time was hold Dark Red and Dark Green's attention as much as possible so they didn't have a chance to go after weaker ships.

As if on cue, both Lions pulled back, breaking off their attack so abruptly it left Pidge reeling, confused to suddenly find themself without a target.

Hunk gave a weary cheer, and Pidge slumped in their seat--but Zarkon hadn't called a retreat, as they'd assumed.

A chilling blackness enveloped Zarkon's lions as, for the first time since the start of the Chettok Campaign, he formed Dark Voltron.

* * *

Something was different about this battle.

Coran could feel it from the very start. It was a small force who came to meet them, small enough that he could leave his bridge crew to his lieutenant and focus wholly on helping the paladins guide the Vkullor toward their decoy.

So why was Dark Voltron here?

Zarkon had always been stingy with his so-called paladins, more often sending them out for a raid on civilian airspace than devoting them to a battle he never intended to win. Usually when he _did_  join the front lines, it meant he was putting some real effort into stalling the Coalition push, and had brought a fleet large enough to back him up.

Not today, it seemed.

Not at first.

Coran kept tabs on the battle, of course, if only to ensure that he didn't miss a shift in the tide while he was watching the Vkullor.

It wasn't so much a shift in the tide, as it happened, as a tsunami appearing on the horizon moments before it came crashing down.

Dark Voltron didn't emit light as it formed; it _consumed_  it, leaving a dark blot on the battlefield that made the backdrop of the stars seem misty gray in comparison, but it drew the eye as surely as a supernova. Coran pursed his lips and opened his mouth to inform Allura of the escalation when light blossomed on the opposite side of the battle, a wormhole that disgorged three more battleships already spewing fighters.

More wormholes blossomed all around, and Coran's heart dropped. "Where are those ships coming from?" Coran demanded, though he had an inkling already. His crew had no answers for him, but as they began to dig, Coran turned back to his call with Allura. "Not to rush you, but it looks like Zarkon has decided to pull out all the stops."

Allura hesitated before responding. "He's brought a large fleet?"

"They're still pouring in." Coran glanced to another screen as reports began to flood in. Their rebel allies recognized many of these ships, and word from rebel strongholds throughout the galaxy further confirmed what Coran had already known. "He's pulling every ship stationed in Chettok. I don't think he wants to go on losing it one world at a time."

"He crushes us here, or he gives up his hold on this region?" Shiro asked. "That's a lot of risk for how Zarkon's been playing it lately."

Allura, though, saw what Coran had. "It hasn't _been_  Zarkon playing it safe. I'll bet you anything Keturah has been the one calling the shots, deciding which of their forces to sacrifice to chip away at our army. She wanted to wear us down, stretch us thin. She would have struck at a dozen points at once, rather than face us in our strength."

Coran nodded. "Looks like Zarkon is growing impatient. Maybe the worlds we've taken have wounded his pride, or maybe Keturah promised results faster than he's seen them. But he's done waiting."

"We knew this was coming," Shiro said. "We knew he was massing his troops."

"And you still have a Vkullor to manage," Coran agreed. "We're not in danger yet, but I thought you should be aware that there's a fight waiting for you here when you get back."

Allura nodded. "We understand. We _must_  be getting close now. How far is the decoy?"

"One-point-two light years," Coran said.

"All right. Just hold on. We'll be there soon."

Coran ended the call just as a new one came in from Command. "Coordinate fire with the _Kera_ ," he told his crew. "Bring down shields so the rebels can move in for the kill."

"Captain, what is this?"

Coran turned to the screen that showed Admiral Ellix in her command ship, a flurry of activity in the background. "This may be the end, Admiral, at least of this campaign."

"You think he's committed?"

"Fully." Coran frowned. "You have a plan?"

Ellix blinked slowly in the Tchulassan way, each of her six eyes in sequence. "We are considering sending out an order to ground-based rebel units. Many of these worlds have been left virtually undefended."

Coran glanced out through the viewscreen, weighing the risk. An attack from every angle could further crush Imperial control over Chettok. Or it could expose allies who counted on secrecy to stay alive.

"Give the order," he said. "We're retaking Chettok today, one way or another."

* * *

Allura took a gamble. It wasn't only her taking it--Shiro was in full agreement with her decision from the moment she conceived it, and she needed only a glimpse of Keith and Matt's minds to know that they felt it too--that desperate restlessness telling them they were wasting time here, two Lions who were desperately needed in the battle happening across the universe.

Their only protest was that they should be the ones to stay.

"We're faster," Keith said. "If things go wrong--"

"Even you can't outrun a Vkullor," Shiro said. "If things go wrong, we're both in trouble, and the only option either of us has is to wormhole away."

"The Black Lion was able to take a larger charge," Allura added. "We'll get two or three more wormholes than you would, and if worse comes to worst, I can probably craft a few more from my own Quintessence."

Matt hesitated a moment longer. "Are you _sure_?"

"Go."

They needed no more urging than that. Shiro flashed their cloak, Red peeled off. Allura felt the wormhole carry them away, though she couldn't see its light at this distance.

After that, it was just them, alone, with a Vkullor on their tail. They couldn't risk waiting until the Vkullor caught up, not without someone else to draw its attention. They jumped as soon as it came close enough to see its eyes, keeping their cloak up the whole while to keep it angry and to keep it focused. They only had five or six wormholes left, and more than a light year to the decoy. It might not be enough.

If it wasn't, they would have to come back after the battle and hope that wasn't so long that the Vkullor got back to where it had been when all this began.

* * *

Dark Voltron was a terrifying force. It always had been, but it had been some time since Coran had witnessed its full power, much less in a context where it could unleash that power on lesser targets. The paladins hounded it as best they could, but there were only three of them. The best they could do was try to make Zarkon angry so he'd target them instead.

More often, he left them in the dust, charging off into the bulk of the Coalition forces to take down as many ships as he could in one fell swoop.

That number was terrifyingly high.

And there wasn't a thing Coran could do. The castle's lasers were too slow; if he tried to shoot Zarkon down, he'd more likely end up hitting an ally, and even if he got lucky, one hit wasn't going to do much of anything.

Command was on the verge of panic. All across the Greater Chettok, resistance strongholds had taken up the call. Many of them had been preparing for battle for years, waiting only for the right opportunity. Today could be that day--but just because the Imperial fleet had withdrawn from occupied worlds didn't mean it would be an easy fight. People would die today. With luck, not many. Not enough to cripple the rebellion. But Coran couldn't stop wondering whether he'd made the right call.

Red arrived with a roar Coran felt rather than heard. One moment, Zarkon was slaughtering Guard pilots who had swarmed him in an attempt to corral him away from the larger ships with their crews of hundreds.

The next, Red had latched onto Dark Voltron's neck and spun it around and making its next shot go wide. Her pilots said nothing, but the rumble in Coran's chest was echoed on the comms as the other paladins errupted in cries of relief.

"Guys!" Hunk said. "You made it!"

Lance sounded considerably less enthused. "I don't see a big Black Lion with you."

"They're finishing up with the Vkullor," Matt said. "Sent us ahead to help deal with this jackass."

He darted another strike at Dark Voltron, but Zarkon had recovered by now and swatted Red away. The other paladins had rallied, though, and they all pounced on Zarkon's moment of distraction.

Four wasn't much better than three, but Red was ferocious. Every time Zarkon swatted her away, she leaped back, refusing to leave him time to find another target.

They didn't need to beat him, Coran reminded himself. They only had to hold him off until Shiro and Allura finished with the Vkullor.

* * *

They were down to the last two charges on their teludav when the Vkullor finally took the bait. Shiro didn't even realize what had happened at first. One minute he was flying, trying his best to gauge how close the Vkullor was, feeling the itch in Allura's fingers to open another wormhole. She'd already braced herself to draw on her own reserves to see this through, even if that meant going into the next battle on shaky legs.

Then, suddenly, the Vkullor blew past them. Shiro's heart leaped into his throat, panic roaring white noise in his ears. He was certain, for a chilling instant, that this was how he died, and even when that moment passed, the Vkullor streaking into the distance, he couldn't force his grip on the controls to loosen.

It was like the beast had found a second wind. He hadn't noticed that the chase had slowed any since it started, though he supposed he had felt like he was waiting for forever for the Vkullor to catch up enough to justify burning another teludav charge. He'd figured that was the knowledge that the rest of his team was waiting for him, that every second he spent here meant a higher toll on the fleet.

Apparently the Vkullor had started to run out of steam during the chase. Or it had begun to lose interest in the cloaked Lion in the distance.

Whatever the case, it was sprinting again now. It passed swiftly beyond the range at which it could jam Black's sensors, and shortly after, Shiro confirmed that it was headed for the decoy. He hailed the crew to give them a warning, though even at the Vkullor's newly invigorated speed it would take hours to reach them.

Then he reached out for Allura, who answered in the form of a wormhole.

The battle exploded around them like a Fourth of July fireworks show, but even before he exited the wormhole, Shiro had found his team. They perked up as Black approached, broke off from Dark Voltron and formed up around him.

In seconds, Voltron was on the field, spearing their dark counterpart through the hip with a sword as it tried to slip past them.

The paladins drew a collective breath, and released their anxiety on the exhale, squaring off against Zarkon as two armies clashed around them. The fleets seemed evenly matched, for once. Zarkon had brought not only a large quantity of ships, but a higher quality than he usually spared, which only lent further credence to the theory that he'd only just taken command back from Keturah.

Allura and Meri's memories of Zarkon, and of his mediocre skill at _eshet_ , brought a smile to the paladins' faces. If Zarkon was the one calling the shots here, that could only be good news--but Shiro quelled that celebration before it grew too far. Zarkon had ordered this fight, yes, but he was right in front of them, his full attention on the paladins. Someone else was overseeing the rest of the battle.

Haggar might not have chosen this battle, but she would salvage what she could. They should be ready for a few surprises.

_Shiro._

Sam's voice shivered through the bond, reaching every mind, and both Pidge and Matt faltered for a moment at the sound of it. Keith picked up Matt's slack, but Val didn't have a yoke of her own, and Voltron's shield was slow to meet Zarkon's next strike.

Sam continued, unaware of the impact his call had had. _I might have some good news for you._

 _I'd welcome some of that right now,_ Shiro said, letting Allura direct his body so he could focus on Sam.

_These lions were made from living beings--intelligent beings, at least by some definitions. We've been trying to make contact with them, see if there's any self-awareness in there that might be able to fight back against Zarkon's control._

_Is there?_

_Rolo and I haven't had any luck yet, but Rax is paired with a Balmera. He thinks he's managed to communicate the situation, and the Balmera is willing to fight._ Sam paused, his silence laced with expectation. _We'd probably only get one shot at it, before Zarkon or Haggar figured out a way to get the Balmera back under control. But if you need it, they should be able to lock this whole thing up for a little while._

Shiro's breath hissed out through his teeth as the implications spread throughout the team. To lock up Dark Voltron--even if only for a few seconds--

That could be everything. In the right circumstances, it could even mean bringing Dark Voltron down for good.

But only if they timed it right.

 _Hold off for now,_ Shiro told Sam. _But tell Rax to be ready for our signal._

* * *

There was a curious, timeless quality that existed in battles like these. Coran was used to it by now, but it still felt like stepping into another world. Hours might have passed since the battle began, or it could have been only moments. Everything happened so quickly, and every moment wore on you as much as a full day's work.

Coran and his crew focused on their job. Others in the fleet had the firepower to disable Imperial warships, but only the Castle of Lions and _Hope of Kera_ \--or Voltron itself--could break the shields to let their allies in. So the castle scattered its fire, hammering until a shield shattered and the moving on as smaller ships swarmed the warships like insects around a carcass.

The rebels had brought stolen gunners and modified bombers to the field--the former stationary but immensely powerful. Given enough time, these gunners may have been able to bring down shields themselves, though they would be destroyed long before that happened. They had powerful shields, but nothing that could stand up to an ion cannon or any of the warships other heavy-hitting guns. The bombers were quicker, capable of destruction on a broad scale, but only against vulnerable targets.

Coran surveyed the battlefield as the bombers returned from a pass at a distant clump of warships Anamuri had rendered defenseless just a few moments before. They were far enough removed from the thick of things that none of the Coalition's forces had struck out that direction, giving the bombers free reign of the area.

A few belated blasts lit up the debris, bluish pulses of Quintessence and ionized matter that rocked the wreckage of Imperial ships like waves in the ocean. Most of the two dozen ships that had been sitting back on that flank were unrecognizable now, ripped apart and left to the mercy of the vacuum. Coran doubted very much there was any part of their interior that remained intact enough to support life; certainly they had no power with which to flee or fight back.

One ship, though, had escaped the worst of the destruction. Its engines were mangled and flickering, the entire ship swaying with the pulse of the last few bombs.

"Curious," Coran murmured.

He'd been on a call with Anamuri, deliberating their next targets so they could alert the rest of the fleet to be ready to strike. "What's curious?" she asked.

"That ship. The hull hasn't been breached, and the weapons appear to still be functional. And yet it isn't attacking."

Anamuri turned away from the camera, squinting at the view outside her bridge. "You want to send the bombers back?"

Coran shook his head. "They have more important targets. If it tries something, I'll take it down myself."

If Anamuri thought it odd that he was leaving a potential threat on the field, she didn't question it, for which Coran was grateful. He couldn't adequately explain his reasoning. He could tell her that it was odd, that Zarkon had drilled the mantra, _Victory or death,_ into his soldiers, that they should have been lashing out, taking down as many Coalition ships as they could before they were silenced for good.

He wasn't sure he could explain why this anomaly felt hopeful rather than ominous--certainly, she wouldn't believe for a second that that ship wasn't trying to lull them into a false sense of security. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps that ship's captain was far more clever, far more patient, than the average Imperial officer. Perhaps Coran _should_  shoot them down and be done with it.

And yet.

Mercy was one of their greatest weapons in this war. The others might not see it, but Coran did. The paladins did. They'd known it from the day they struck out to liberate Revinor: a statement to the entire Empire, a promise of safety for those who chose peace. A promise they'd doubled down on in liberating the homeworld and welcoming them into the Coalition.

It was a desperate hope, to think that an Imperial warship might willingly surrender rather than fight to the bitter end. Such a thing went against all the training and conditioning that an Imperial officer endured from a young age. It would be remarkable for a single officer to give up the fight--an entire warship?

It was impossible.

And yet the ship remained quiet as the battle raged on. Coran gave out orders, surveyed the field of battle, noted the currents, advised Layeni and the Coalition Command of weak points in need of reinforcements.

All the while, he kept a close eye on the silent ship, waiting for them to prove him wrong.

* * *

Zarkon was losing. He had to see it by now.

His fleet was dwindling. The paladins couldn't get a count in the middle of their duel with Dark Voltron, but they could sense the flow of the battle. The Coalition had lost a number of ships, yes.

The Empire had lost more, and more powerful ones.

At a glance, it seemed the Empire had had the upper hand coming into this battle. Dozens of warships against a fleet of much smaller, weaker vessels? But there was something to be said for a fleet that was too agile to be hit by the big guns, with heavily armored support ships solely focused on softening up Imperial defenses. Lance had chosen a similar army for many a game of _eshet_ , and he greatly preferred it to an army of slow, heavy tanks.

It hadn't been a foregone conclusion, by any means. The warships Zarkon had pulled into this fight were those stationed to support occupations and other ground assaults; half of them were outfitted with additional surveillance equipment in place of ion cannons--but many of them _did_  have the big guns, and both the castle-ship and the _Hope of Kera_  had taken some hard hits. Had either gone down, this battle could easily have gone the other way.

Zarkon was slow to admit defeat, hounding Voltron, ignoring the battle raging around him.

Until, suddenly, he changed course.

Dark Voltron took a bad hit, tumbling away from Voltron, but rather than recover and retaliate as usual, Zarkon boosted further away. His lions melted apart, streaking off into the battle.

 _He's calling an attack,_  Sam warned. _Skerok Zem...?_

"The Honorable Death," Keith said. "It's one of the standard orders, named after a Prince who supposedly brought a planet to his knees while dying of his wounds. Zarkon knows the battle is lost, but his only goal now is to do as much damage as possible before the end. They're not going to retreat."

Keith's urgency spread out to infect them all. Nyma cursed herself for not expecting this, Lance scanned the battlefield, searching for where the shift would happen. The Imperial fleet was already firing with everything they had, already dug in. _Victory or death_ \--wasn't that the Imperial way?

Keith's experience, however far removed from battles like this one, said this was different. They had never planned to retreat, but no officer was careless with his ship.

Not until he knew the end was at hand.

Allura's mouth ran dry. "All ships fall back!" she cried, switching to an open channel as Voltron split apart. They raced toward the battle, each angling for a different warship, for the ones already in the thick of battle. "Fall back! Repeat--"

The first warship detonated in a blaze of white that seared the paladins' eyes. Val cried out, Nyma's heart broke, and every one of them pressed onward, racing into the cloud of debris, of Imperial and Coalition ships destroyed in the same breath. The Imperials had lost more than the Coalition in that blast, but the Coalition had lost dozens, if not hundreds--probably more than that warship had taken down in the rest of the battle so far.

Any one of these warships might be prepared to do the same. Their engines ignited, bringing them in toward the center of battle, toward Coalition ships large and small, suicide bombers on an unfathomable scale.

"Open fire!" Shiro roared. "All ships, open fire! We need to stop those ships before they get close enough to take us down with them!"

* * *

"All ships, open fire!"

Shiro's voice was as taut as Coran had ever heard it, and it resonated with the tension on the bridge. They hardly needed the order; much of the fleet had begun their barrage before the glare of the first explosion had faded. Shiro's cries were meant for that segment of Coalition ships who were new to warfare, the ones who had descended into chaos, fleeing or freezing as their allies burned to ash in a silent explosion, brilliant as it was brief, the warship's artificial atmosphere going up in a flash.

A small number of warships still had their shields up, and Coran concentrated eighty percent of the castle's fire on these, each in turn, hammering through the shield and shredding the warship before moving onto the next. The remaining twenty percent of shots he directed to the most immediate threats, the ships that were closest to the fleet.

Two more self-destructed before the fleet could bring them down, but they did so preemptively, perhaps as much from spite as anything, as though they would rather choose their own death than be shot down. Unfortunately, their effort wasn’t totally in vain. It wasn’t the explosion itself that was the danger; it was the shrapnel: jagged pieces of metal, some as big as a fighter, propelled outward in all directions at terrifying speeds. Not everyone could get clear in time.

The paladins tore through the battlefield, sparing Zarkon's lions no mind. They were hounding the fleet, chewing up Coalition ships while everyone was focused on the fleet of bombs waiting to detonate.

Coran experienced an odd twinge in his gut through the adjunct bond: a spurt of surprise, a flash of anger and resistance, then horror, and the Blue Lion suddenly veered off from the Imperial fleet, Red close on her tail. The two of them together slammed into Zarkon's lions. They held nothing back, clawing, biting, firing with every weapon they had, the evolved Voltron bond on full display as two lions hounded five. It wasn't an even match, not quite, but it sent Zarkon's lions into a panic, and they abandoned their hunt to wholly focus on Red and Blue.

"Captain!" Coran spun toward the comms officer who had called, her voice urgent and her brow furrowed in genuine worry. "Incoming transmission."

"From who?"

The woman's eyes darted to the viewscreen, toward the dark, distant ship graveyard where one lone warship drifted. "I think it's that drifter, sir. Should I put it through?"

Coran's heart hammered as he nodded. What was this? A trap? A ploy? Hard as he searched, he couldn't see the use. The ship was too far from battle, and the self-destructing fleet was doing far more damage without the subterfuge.

A young Galra, helmetless, dressed in the armor of an ordinary footsoldier, stood at the center of the bridge, her wide eyes darting toward every beep and flash.

"This is the Castle of Lions," Coran said, taking in the scene. Warning lights flashed all around. Shadows moved in the background, rushing around, every one of them as overwhelmed as the young woman whose eyes lit on Coran and stuck. Nowhere did Coran see the dark armor and bloody crest of an Imperial officer. "Identify yourself."

The young woman opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

"Identify yourself," Coran repeated.

She drew in a shuddering breath and finally seemed to steady. "My name is Larak ve Zehol, acting captain of the _Seeker_... Is it true you freed the prisoners from Revinor? Cowards, traitors, deserters..."

Coran could hardly breathe. The battle raged on beyond this call, bursts of light, shouts of triumph and dismay from his crew, but Coran had eyes only for Larak. "I wouldn't call any of them cowards, Captain Larak. It takes a very brave individual to stand up to Zarkon and his Empire."

Larak's ear's fell back, her breath hitching. By the _ancients,_  how old was she? No older than the oldest of the paladins, to be sure. Perhaps no older, even, than Keith.

"I only joined up to feed my family," she whispered. "I don't care about the war, and I don't want to die for it. None of us do."

"You won't, Larak," Coran said. "I swear it to you. You don't have to die here."

She shook her head. "We mutinied. I killed my commanding officer. If anyone realizes--" She jumped as the light changed. "They keep calling me. I think they know. I don't know what to do. They're going to kill us. What do I do?"

"Stay where you are," Coran said--a pointless order; the engines on that ship were too badly damaged to get Larak and her fellow deserters anywhere. He said it anyway, because this young woman clearly wasn't used to command. He doubted she'd even seen battle much before today. It was a particular cruelty of this universe that such burdens so often fell on the young and frightened, and Coran couldn't help but yearn to take as much of that burden as he could. "Larak. Captain!"

She jerked away from the title, but her eyes returned to Coran, her ragged breathing calming. She seemed to have instigated this mutiny, alone or with others. A brave young woman, indeed, and one who felt responsible for what happened next. Another unfair burden, but one that seemed to put her in a different mindset: not that of a frightened child, but of a leader.

She was _very_  much like the paladins in that regard.

"I'm sending help," Coran said. "Stay where you are. Do not respond to any calls except my own. Do not fight back, but if you have any mechanics or engineers who can repair your shield, have them do so. And Larak." He waited until she met his eyes, then nodded. "You've done very well so far. I'm sure your family will be proud."

Coran would have liked to stay on the line with Larak longer, to talk her through this battle, to keep her calm, but his focus was needed elsewhere. He called Command to explain the situation, pulling Anamuri, Layeni, the paladins, and Mirek from the homeworld fleet into the call as well.

Admiral Ellix's face darkened at once. "They can't be trusted."

"With all due respect, Admiral," Coran said. "You didn't speak with her. I did, and I can personally vouch for her sincerity."

Ellix shook her head. "It's a trap. We should open fire before they have a chance to spring it."

"You will do no such thing." Allura's voice was as cold as Coran had ever heard it, louder and quicker as well--though he suspected that was to cut off Matt, who had started on a far less civil reply of his own at the same moment.

Ellix bristled, drawing herself up as though preparing for a fight, but Coran had stacked the call against her. One glance showed that it wasn't only the paladins who agreed with Coran. Layeni had plenty of Galra in her ranks, and Mirek was herself Galra. Any number of soldiers on that ship might be from the homeworld, as Coran suspected Larak herself was. Even Anamuri--not at first the most trusting of Galra--had fought alongside enough of them by now to give them a fair shake.

Admiral Ellix scowled, but backed down. "If you want to throw yourselves on their swords, be my guest. I will not sacrifice my pilots for your misplaced trust."

"All I ask is that you leave them be," Coran said. "Keep your ships clear, and aim your fire in another direction."

"Captain!"

Coran looked up, despair slithering through his veins as he saw what his crew already had. Six ships from Zarkon's fleet had turned away from the Coalition forces, swinging their noses toward the _Seeker_ as their weapons began to charge.

" _No!_ " Keith cried. The Red Lion abandoned her battle with Zarkon's lions, leaving Blue to fend them off alone.

But they were completely on the opposite side of the battle as the _Seeker_ and it's attackers; even with their Voltron-boosted speed, they weren't going to get there in time.

Six ships opened fire.

Pidge roared in defiance as a blur of green dove into the line of fire, twisting, skimming through the stream of lasers and an ion cannon's beam. She was too small to catch it all, one lion against a small fleet, but her pilots were determined, and Red was close on their heels. The _Seeker_ reeled from the barrage, but held together, a feeble emergency shield flickering to life a moment later.

"Pidge!" Keith cried, grunting as he and Matt tore through the center of the attacking ships. Two flared their engines, firing again and moving as though to ram the _Seeker_. Red brought them down, too, gaping holes torn through their hulls.

"We're fine," Val said, though she couldn't disguise the pain in her voice. Green's shield was blackened and scorched, and glowing at the seams like a caged star.

"More than fine," Pidge said. "Clear the way!"

Red darted aside as Green unleashed a blast that tore through an entire line of warships, plunging six, seven, eight ships deep before it burned itself out. The glow of Green's eyes seemed to have dimmed in its wake, but she was still flying, and Pidge growled a challenge as Red fell in beside them and another segment of Zarkon's fleet turned.

This was personal now. Two lions standing between a ship full of traitors and Imperial justice. Neither side would back down, Coran knew.

He only hoped he hadn't promised Larak the impossible.


	38. Momentum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The Coalition finds itself in the midst of what may be the final battle of the Chettok campaign. Zarkon has pulled his forces from all across the galaxy, pooling everything in one last bid to stop the Coalition's momentum. Black and Red had been taunting the Vkullor, leading it in a chase toward a decoy they hope will keep it well clear of friendly skies while Anamuri finishes up work in the Klenahn Cannon.
> 
> The gambit works, and all the paladins join in the battle, but Zarkon quickly realizes he's lost, and he orders one final, suicidal strike, his remaining forces charging the Coalition fleet and self-destructing. The crew of one warship, the Seeker, has mutinied, led by a young woman named Larak, but their engines are dead, the crew in chaos. They throw themselves on the paladins' mercy, and Pidge and Val planted the Green Lion firmly between the Seeker and Zarkon's rear guard, who means to see the traitors dead. Red quickly joins her--but the battle isn't over yet.

The Green Lion was in rough shape. Val didn't know how many hits she'd taken in that last barrage, but it was probably more than Green had been built to absorb. Warning indicators were flashing all across the console, an acrid, hot-metal scent hung in the air, and enough Quintessence had made its way into the cockpit itself that Val’s joints had begun to ache.

Phantom pains, she told herself. Her crystal implants had never spread as far as Matt's, certainly never far enough to cause joint pain.

Even with the pain, even with Green's weariness dragging at her limbs, Val couldn't regret what they'd done. There was a ship full of people behind them--maybe not quite innocent, maybe not entirely--but people who didn't get a say in how Zarkon ran things. People who had been manipulated into joining the army because they had no other options.

People who, at the _very least_ , were trying to be better.

Pidge looked at them, and they saw Keith: young, scared, angry--people who didn't agree with the Empire's ways, but had never known anything better. People who could _change_ , if given half a chance.

Their thoughts took on a frantic tone, almost pleading, like they thought they had to sway Val to their side. She reached out across the gap between their chairs and squeezed their wrist, flashing a smile as the detritus of half a dozen shattered warships cleared, making way for a second wave behind.

There was no question here: they were going to protect the _Seeker_ to their dying breath. For Keith and Rolo and the people they'd rescued from Revinor and the Galra of New Altea and the homeworld--for every Galra out there who was more than what Zarkon had shaped them into, for anyone who might even allow for the _possibility_  of a better universe, for peace instead of bloodshed...

They would not stand aside.

* * *

"Fall back to Position Four, crescent formation."

The orders rang in the corners of Coran's awareness, and he gave the signal for his crew to obey. The Imperial fleet was closing the distance, even despite the corpses of a dozen fellows blocking their way. The analysis Coran had requested appeared on another screen, and he glanced at it, wincing at the estimates near the top.

The first warship to detonate the charges it carried had done a lot of damage. Too much, even if they'd managed to avoid the worst of it since. Their fleet had pulled back to hover level with the Castle of Lions and _Hope of Kera_ , many of the smallest fighters now enclosed in the two fortresses' shields. Only the bombers ventured beyond this line, daring passes at the closest warships and the ones that still had functional ion cannons.

The castle's shields were red in nearly every quadrant, and _Kera_  had already had to divert power away from their engines and auxiliary systems to keep their defenses intact.

"Hold the line," Coran murmured, though he didn't bother to broadcast it over the comms. Command was barking orders left and right--panicking, and trying not to show it. They had combat experience, but they'd never fought a war on this scale before, and it showed. He urged them to hold steady, for just a few moments more. Zarkon's fleet was in shambles, and rapidly falling. Aside from the splinter that had gone to hound the _Seeker_ , there were fewer than twenty major vessels left. The sky was thick with transmissions, now tapering off. Every one Coran's crew had managed to intercept had been a call for reinforcements.

So far, none had come.

The Coalition  _would_  win, that much was clear. They might very well do so without any more significant losses, so long as they remained calm and focused their fire.

At least Anamuri wasn't panicking, and their two ships together could deal with most of this rabble.

In the middle distance, just beyond the line of advancing warships, two sets of lions clashed. Coran had an earpiece tuned to the paladins' comms--he needed to keep abreast of their status in more detail than the flashes of emotion granted him by the adjunct bond, but his crew didn't need any more distractions than they already had.

"Buy us some time!" Shiro called, suddenly splitting off from Blue and Yellow and leaving them to fend off all five of Zarkon's lions. The cluster of warships that had broken off the main line was closing in on Green, Red, and the _Seeker_. Pidge and Val were quiet, murmuring reassurances with labored breath and refusing to budge, but otherwise not responding to Keith and Matt's frantic questions.

They had reason to be worried. Green had taken quite a beating in that last assault, and it was showing. She dragged as she shifted to keep herself between the fleet and the crippled warship, the glow of her eyes worryingly dim. True, the lions had surprised Coran on more than one occasion, and with the recent evolution of the Voltron bond, it was very possible Green could endure another barrage like the last.

He doubted very much she'd survive anything more than that.

As the Black Lion slammed into the rearmost warship, a waver in the main line recaptured Coran's attention. One of the ships, which had been lagging behind, began to turn, angling down away from the battle. A wormhole blossomed, and the ship dove in, vanishing as Zarkon's Black Lion spun toward the light. It opened its maw and fired a laser after the retreating ship, but the wormhole closed an instant too soon.

The laser passed beyond into open space.

All five of Zarkon's lions froze for a fraction of an instant, then moved at the same time, Zarkon heading after Shiro and Allura while the rest split off and tried to slip past the Blue and Yellow Lions.

The paladins didn't need to speak to coordinate; Yellow pivoted and grabbed Dark Blue's tail in her jaw, continuing the turn and slinging it into Dark Yellow. Blue shot ahead, Nyma nailing Dark Green with long-range shots while Lance and Meri focused on Dark Red. Yellow caught up to Dark Green a moment later, hemming it in, driving it back toward the pack as the other two caught up.

The paladins weren't holding back today; they couldn't afford to. They'd kept their full power secret until now, but they had to be in too many places at once, and it was taking every bit of speed, stamina, and power they could muster.

Across the battlefield, Zarkon closed in on the standoff happening at the _Seeker._

* * *

Helpless rage seared through Matt's veins as the warships opened fire again. One or two of them seemed to actually be trying to hit the _Seeker_. The rest, seeing that Pidge and Val had made themselves human shields, were perfectly happy to turn the Green Lion into target practice.

Red zipped around behind the line of warships, coming at them from one side while Black attacked from the other, a pincer maneuver that could only mitigate the damage and not stop it altogether. Green turned her shield toward the onslaught, but it drove her back, closer and closer to the _Seeker_ and its flickering shields.

A sickening _crunch_  sounded over the comms, and Matt and Keith broke off their attack at the same moment to spin toward the Green Lion. There were only two warships left, anyway; let Shiro and Allura deal with them.

Green drifted, lifeless, just outside the _Seeker_ 's shields, her shield cracked and warped, the migraine-inducing light of Quintessence dripping from the jagged edges, so concentrated it looked more liquid than anything, at least until it met the vacuum of space and dispersed into a luminous mist.

"Pidge!" Matt cried. "Val!"

He reached out through the bond, intertwining minds asking and offering reassurance in the same instant. He felt their aches as though they were his own, siphoned off some of their grogginess as the Green Lion reeled from her wound.

"They tried to absorb too much energy," Hunk offered, distracted but still attuned to every lion as though it were his own. "Weapons are fried, since they were connected directly to that shield. Looks like the engine caught some of the excess. I don't think there's any major damage there, but it did overload. Gonna take a minute or two to restart."

The world lurched, just a little, as something slammed into the Black Lion. She'd hardly finished with the last warship, and the shock of the collision, even second-hand, knocked Matt senseless for a fraction of a moment.

When he recovered, it was to see Zarkon's Black Lion inches from his viewscreen. It slammed into him, firing two shots at point blank range before speeding off in the direction of the _Seeker_.

A growl took root in Keith's throat, and in Akira's not a moment later, and Matt let the anger surge through him. Shiro and Allura were already chasing after Zarkon, but Red easily overtook them, seizing on Zarkon's lion's back foot and halting her motion. It twisted, blasting Red again and again until she lost her grip, but by then Black was upon them, tackling Zarkon and carrying him away from the _Seeker_.

A moment of understanding passed between the four paladins and their lions. They were done playing with Zarkon. No more holding back, no more holding him at bay. They fought to kill.

Red's speed still sometimes surprised Matt. He'd gotten used to it--to how she flew alone. But when they were like this, Voltron, in five bodies, it was like space itself rushed to get out of their path. Wherever Zarkon moved, Matt and Keith were there to meet him, stopping him in his tracks long enough for Black to dart in and snap at his heels.

In moments, the tenor of Zarkon's movements changed. Anger cooled to fear, confidence to confusion. Zarkon knew what Voltron was capable of; he and Keturah had built their lions to be a perfect match for the real deal. The paladins had been outflying Zarkon's lions for weeks now, but Matt imagined Zarkon had rationalized it away as luck, or maybe some defect of the mind control he used to ensure the other lions remained loyal to him.

This, though, was something new, and it terrified Zarkon. He abandoned all pretense of getting to the _Seeker_ and instead tried to break away, back to the other lions. Through Shay's eyes, Matt saw them trying to answer Zarkon's calls, but Blue and Yellow impeded them, hounding them, cutting off every route to Zarkon's aide.

Matt's mind was sharper in this form, his reaction time quickened by the Voltron bond, just as it was quickened by his bond with Keith, but to an even greater degree. So he saw the moment Zarkon tucked his tail, knew before it happened that a wormhole was coming, saw another in the distance, where Blue and Yellow were wrangling the rest of the lions--but trying to keep them from approaching Zarkon and unprepared for a sudden reversal.

They wouldn't be fast enough to give chase. Even Black wouldn't be, for though she was as close as Red, her momentum was all wrong, and Shiro and Allura took fractions of a second longer to comprehend.

Keith and Matt and Akira were already moving, chasing after Zarkon. Shiro and Allura's minds caught up, and they tried to pull them back, but it was too late to change course now. Zarkon plunged into his wormhole. The Red Lion followed. And the wormhole closed behind them.

* * *

With Dark Voltron's retreat, the battle was essentially over. Coran broadcast on an open frequency, offering mercy to any ship that withdrew from the fighting and powered down. It was a long shot and he knew it--and indeed, aside from a handful of fighters, several of whom were shot down by their neighbors as they turned to flee, none of the fleet seemed inclined to challenge the mantra that had been drilled into them for years.

Coran felt better for having offered, though, and helped to clean up without remorse. The paladins came in from behind, the fleet attacked from the front, and in a matter of moments, it was done.

A cheer went up among the fleet, though it petered out as Coran maneuvered the castle-ship toward the _Seeker._ Mirek followed, as did the paladins, though Coran could feel the Blues’ festering concern for Keith, Matt, and Akira. It had been mere moments since they’d vanished in pursuit of Zarkon, but the bond had frayed and there was so far no sign of a hasty retreat. Coran had begun the process of tracing that wormhole, but he suspected it would be futile.

After a moment's hesitation, Anamuri brought the _Kera_ in behind the rest of them, either afraid to get too close to the _Seeker_ or resolving to act as a buffer between the castle-ship and the rest of the fleet, whose stony silence and wary distance made their stance perfectly clear.

Coran would need to speak with them later, or perhaps have Allura and Shiro do it instead. Distrust of the Empire was perfectly reasonable, of course, and Coran wouldn't ask any of them to take in these Galra as refugees. But they had to allow for the possibility of surrender, if only for the sake of pragmatism.

This could be the start of the end for the Empire, but only if they let it happen.

"Captain Larak," Coran said, opening a new call to the _Seeker_. Larak appeared at once, much diminished from when he'd last spoken with her. In the background, he heard the sound of muffled sobs. Panic, it seemed, had given way to exhaustion. He smiled at her. "The battle is over. We're going to take you aboard. How many of you are there?"

"I'm... I'm not sure, exactly," Larak said. "We haven't done a count since the mutiny. I know a lot of people died in the fighting."

"That's all right. Give me your best guess. Fifty? A hundred?"

"Um... A hundred? Maybe more. There were a little over two hundred people stationed on the _Seeker_ , and most of us wanted to surrender."

"Okay." Coran spoke slowly, keeping his voice low. He could see a few more soldiers in the background now that they weren't all running around in a tizzy. They all seemed as young as Larak. A ship full of new recruits, perhaps? No wonder they'd mutinied. "I need you to see if you have any shuttles that survived the fighting. Cargo ships, passenger ships, anything like that. If you find something, you let me know. We're going to bring you over twenty or thirty at a time, all right?"

Larak nodded. Far from protesting the cautions, she seemed relieved to have someone telling her what to do. Coran pitied her and admired her in equal measure, and as she left to make arrangements, Coran headed down to the hangar where he would have her transports dock. The paladins indicated they were on their way. Coran instructed Layeni to dispatch a few squads of Guard pilots in case anyone turned violent, but he also invited Mirek to bring a small welcoming committee of her own. Familiar faces might help to reassure these soldiers that they hadn't just thrown their lives away.

The rest, he knew, was up to them.

* * *

Keith didn't think, when he plunged into a wormhole in pursuit of Zarkon, whether or not it was a smart thing to do. Zarkon was dangerous, but the Red Lion was both faster and stronger than his. They could end this here and now.

It was a chance they had to take.

Matt and Akira felt the same, and so--here they were. Alone in a swirl of white and blue, nipping at the heels of Zarkon's lion. Movement through a wormhole was always odd. Keith had always attributed it to the fact that it took no time at all to pass through, from an outside perspective, and yet it felt like longer than that when you were inside. Not by a lot--maybe five or six seconds instead of half of one--but enough that the skewed perspective might explain why nothing seemed to respond the way he wanted it to.

Right now it meant that he couldn't catch up to Zarkon, no matter how hard the three of them strained for a little bit more speed. They'd entered the wormhole at an odd angle, and they seemed now to be veering wide, pulling away from Zarkon but unable to course-correct.

The other end of the wormhole burned deepest black up ahead, a swirling portal to somewhere they probably didn't want to be. It was close enough to feel Dark Red's presence like a throbbing wound at the bond's very root.

Zarkon shot out the far end of the wormhole while Keith and Matt were still straining to bring themselves back into alignment. They had one drawn-out second to recognize the bleeding edges of the portal, blackness flaking off like bits of ash and vanishing into the white-blue swirl.

Keith's breath froze in his lungs.

The portal closed. The wormhole collapsed.

The turbulence that followed left no room for rational thought. It brought to mind Class V rapids, though Keith couldn't begin to guess where the thought came from. The Voltron bond slipped from his grasp, stinging as it went like a loose cord had whipped him, leaving behind a thundering headache. Or maybe he'd hit his head as they tumbled about.

It lasted only a moment, but it took much longer to recover. Everything was spinning, his body aching, his pulse fluttering in a way that suggested something more than mere adrenaline.

"Everyone okay?" Matt asked, and Keith realized belatedly that it wasn't only the Voltron bond that had eluded him; the paladin bond, too, had gone out of focus. It was still there, and the others slid back into his mind easily enough when he reached for them, Matt shaken and somewhat sheepish, Akira aching more than the other two.

"That's gonna bruise," Akira muttered, picking himself up off the floor. He'd skidded to the outer edge of the cockpit, but though he rubbed his shoulder as he walked back to his usual post between Keith's chair and Matt's, he showed no other signs of injury. His mind, even now, felt distant, drawn toward something far away.

Dark Red.

"Where are we?" Matt asked. The question was somewhat redundant, as he'd already pulled up the navigation system to check. Turned out they were nowhere, much. The blank space between two uninhabited solar systems, unremarkable in any way.

"Close."

Frowning, Keith turned and hooked his arm over the back of his chair. "Close?" he repeated. "Close to what?"

Akira said nothing, but he was glaring at the wall like something there had personally offended him. As the silence drew on, Matt, too, turned. He met Keith's eye, and silently probed the bond, looking for whatever it might be that had caught Akira's attention and snared it so thoroughly.

"Dark Red?" Keith asked.

Akira bristled, but finally tore his gaze away from the wall and circled around Matt's seat, reaching down to highlight a portion of the map. He hesitated, then made an adjustment.

"What's this?" Matt asked.

"We need to get back to the others."

Keith narrowed his eyes. "Why?"

Akira, though, only shook his head.

"Let's just go," Matt said. "There's nothing here, and we're probably better off _not_  fighting Dark Voltron on our own."

He was right, as much as Keith hated to admit that Zarkon had done them a favor in violently ejecting them from the wormhole. Probably said something about how much they'd scared him that he had. The smarter thing to do would have been to let them come charging in and surround them. They could manage two of his lions at once, _maybe_  three. Five was beyond ludicrous.

The Red Lion was still charged up from the Vkullor chase, so it was a simple thing to open a wormhole back to the fleet. As they plunged in, Keith glanced over his shoulder and found Akira still staring into the distance as though, if he just searched hard enough, he would be able to see Dark Red across however many light years separated them.

* * *

Larak, self-appointed leader of the mutineers, was on the first shuttle to the castle-ship. Shiro wasn't sure if that was bravery, subjecting herself to potential capture, torture, and execution before the rest of her crew... Or if she was just that desperate to get away from the _Seeker_ and everything that had happened there.

Coran hadn't been exaggerating her youth. Though tall--tall for a human; somewhere around average height for a Galra--she was thin and gangling, like she'd only recently hit a growth spurt. Her ears were soft and leaf-shaped, more slender than Keith's and more horizontal, as well. The overall impression was closer to an elk than a bat or feline like most Galra Shiro had known. The fine fuzz that covered her face and the deep violet stripe running down to her broad nose only reinforced the impression.

She held herself tall as Shiro, Allura, and Coran approached. Most of the rest of the paladins had gathered inside the hangar, lurking around the edges with the Guard pilots Layeni had brought as security. Keith, Matt, and Akira weren't back, but they had called saying they were on their way, so that was one weight off Shiro's shoulders.

Now they just needed to get these people settled.

Arrayed around the hangar, encircling Larak and the nineteen others she'd brought along, were some thirty members of Mirek's crew, and more still arriving, all of whom had friends or relatives in Zarkon's army. Larak scanned their faces, her eyes widening as they swept back to Shiro, Allura, and Coran.

"It's really true?"

"That we have Galra on our side?" Allura asked. "It's true. We don't turn our back on people in need, Larak. No matter where they come from."

"Whether you want to stop Zarkon, or whether you just want to get away from the war, we'll help you do it," Shiro added. "If any of you have family or friends from the homeworld who--"

"Larak!"

Shiro turned toward the cry to find a young Galra man pushing through the crowd. He was a few years older than Larak herself with the same deer-like ears and a generous mane of hair so dark it was nearly black. Larak let out a whimper and flung herself at him, curling into his embrace like a much younger child. Shiro couldn't help but tear up at the sight, smiling as the tense atmosphere filling the hangar eased somewhat.

The young man eventually lifted his nose from Larak's hair and caught sight of Shiro, Allura, and Coran. "Uh... My apologies, paladins. Captain Coran." He moved as though to clap a fist to his shoulder in salute, then realized Larak was still clinging to his chest and hesitated. He settled, eventually, for pulling her closer. "My name is Karo. Larak is my cousin. She left last year, just before the _Nezai_ started to make a stir. Signed up for the army after my aunt fell ill."

A year. Shiro could have cursed. Zarkon must be desperate for troops if he was sending new recruits out with less than a year of training. No wonder Larak had looked so petrified back there.

Shiro cleared his throat. "As I was saying..." He turned halfway back toward the small knot of deserters, two others of whom had latched onto one of Mirek's soldiers. "Anyone with friends or family on the homeworld who will take them in is welcome to return home. We'll help you get in touch, if you like. If any of you want to fight alongside us, to stop Zarkon and his army, speak with Mirek." He gestured to her. "The rest of you, hold tight. We'll get you set up here on the castle or on the _Defender_ with Mirek for now. We're working to find a new homeworld for the Galra people, a healthier one, though I'm afraid that may have to wait until we're able to move about the universe more freely."

A few heads nodded, and Larak dragged herself away from her cousin to start organizing people, pulling aside those who hailed from the homeworld before sending the shuttle back for the next load. Coran took down names of family and friends, and people began to trickle out of the room, Guard pilots leading them to a block of unoccupied civilian quarters out in Red Tower.

Larak stayed behind, Karo at her shoulder, to greet the rest of her people as Shiro and Allura repeated the same spiel. At some point, Keith and Matt slipped into the room, though Shiro only noticed because the sight of the--apparently infamous--Galra paladin created quite a stir among the former Imperial soldiers.

Their eyes met over the crowd, and Keith offered a shy smile. He didn't cry, but he seemed stunned when more than one of the deserters came up to him for a quiet word, sometimes a salute or a clasped hand, and Shiro could see that he was moved.

Shiro only hoped today wouldn't be the last time they got to see this.

Akira appeared silently at Shiro's shoulder between the second and third waves of mutineers, touching his elbow to draw his attention. Shiro turned, distracted, then focused sharply at the uncharacteristically serious expression pinching Akira's brow.

"Have you heard from Commander Holt since the battle?"

Shiro frowned. "No. Is something wrong?"

Akira shook his head. "The next time you hear from him, ask if they went straight back to the lab after the battle."

"Why?"

Akira had already turned to go, but he paused, glancing back at Shiro, looking guarded but hopeful. "Because if they did, I might be able to take us there."

* * *

Eli would admit he'd been neglecting the Voltron Radio project he'd started not long after moving to the Castle of Lions. Oh, he'd kept it on the air, and he put together a special report now and again, sometimes with Val, sometimes with Thace or Karen.

Mostly, though, he just set it to re-broadcast other people's accounts of Voltron's activities, some of them weeks out of date, or let Sebastian run with his own ideas. It was something for Eli to turn to when he was bored or needed a distraction, but there were far too many hours in the day to fill with new content, and far too much else to think about to worry whether he was doing enough. The important thing was to get word of Voltron out there, anyway.

Well, he had a _project_  again now, and a hefty one.

"Interviews?" Eli asked. "With who?"

"The Galra," Shiro said. "Any of them who will talk to you, but especially the people we just brought on board, if they're up for it. Or anyone from the homeworld who has family in Zarkon's army."

Eli grabbed his tablet, opening a new memo to jot things down. "Okay... What am I interviewing them about? Who's the audience here?"

"Other soldiers." Shiro leaned his elbows on his knees, his gaze going distant. "We've talked about this before, but it's always been a sort of fantasy. Zarkon drills it into his soldiers: there is no such thing as surrender. You win or you die. Doesn't matter how welcoming we are. Then Larak mutinied, and a hundred and thirty-odd former Imperial soldiers laid down their weapons. They chose peace."

Eli began to see what Shiro was getting at. Larak had taken a tremendous risk by throwing herself and her crew on the mercy of the Coalition, and she'd only done it because she'd heard that Voltron took in cowards and traitors--took in people who chose peace over conquest, in other words.

They spent nearly two hours discussing the logistics of it--how to broach the subject, how to edit the footage he got, who would be more persuasive to the listeners, even how they were going to spread it. Eli could broadcast it; in fact, Shiro insisted that he do so, because the Voltron Radio wasn't meant to be top secret. The Empire was almost certainly listening already, just in case they heard something useful.

(Shiro didn't say so directly, but Eli suspected he also hoped to humanize the Galra to a wider audience, to show the universe that _Galra_  was not synonymous with _the Empire_ , to begin to build a culture where Galra weren't automatically the enemy.)

They weren't only relying on the primary broadcast, however. Shiro planned to release the recordings internally, and to spread them as far as he could. Anyone in the Empire might surrender; any might defect.

Even before they'd finished talking, Eli was spinning plans. He needed to talk to Mirek, see about collecting interviews from the homeworld itself. How many soldiers were like Larak, only there to help family back home? How many of them would walk away in an instant if they knew their family's situation had improved? From what Shiro had said, communication between civilians and members of the military was limited at best; much of the army may not even know the homeworld had been liberated.

Eli recruited Val to help with the interviews, and then all of the paladins' parents--except for Karen, who had enough work for three people thanks to the suddenly-accelerated negotiations with the Chettok rebels. All of them proved more skilled interviewers than Eli, who had always focused on camera angles, lighting, editing, and the like, and left the talking to others. Some, like Val and Lana, excelled at drawing stories out of the more wary volunteers. Others, Rosa especially, were just so sympathetic it made the atmosphere in the room positively electric.

In two days, they had more footage than Eli could edit alone, but Sebastian sank his hooks in and turned out some truly heart-wrenching cuts, and Keith stopped by to offer his advice on how to sway someone who had been born and raised in the Empire.

By the end of the day, they were already broadcasting interviews. Pidge hacked an internal memo system to spread them farther, and Allura passed them along to Kolivan to deliver to whatever agents remained behind enemy lines.

They saw no immediate response--but then, they hadn't expected to. People didn't just surrender because you asked them to. Maybe some would run away, maybe some would turn up on the Coalition's doorstep in a few days or weeks, seeking asylum.

More likely, the best they could hope was for a repeat of the _Seeker_. People who weren't ready to die for Zarkon's cause, when confronted with a losing battle and certain death, might just choose surrender over going out in a blaze of glory. People who only persevered because they believed Zarkon unkillable might, at the very least, lay down their weapons once he was gone, rather than carry on without their leader.

Eli didn't know. He wasn't a numbers man, and he was no better than anyone else at predicting what people would do. Members of an aggressive alien military, even less so.

But they'd put it out into the universe now, and they would continue to do so.

Only time would tell whether it had been worth the effort.

* * *

"We can't afford to lose this momentum."

It was the day after the last battle, and the paladins had gathered for another strategy session, this time talking about their way forward. The Greater Chettok wasn't what any of them would call secure, but it had been more than twenty-four hours and Zarkon had yet to launch another attack.

Lance was up and pacing, the motion little more than a flicker at the edge of Pidge's vision as they pored over the reports that had been flooding in over the last day.

"I mean, think about it," Lance went on. "We just tore through a big chunk of Zarkon's fleet--a fleet he can't replenish anymore, not with any kind of speed. I don't know exactly how much he's got left--"

"About two-thirds what he started the Chettok campaign with," Pidge offered, not looking up. They'd run the numbers on that last night, after Shiro had asked for a general picture of what it would look like if Zarkon decided to go all-in right now. "And a lot of _that_  is tied up in various occupations. If we're talking mobile forces he could commit to a fight today, Zarkon can only muster about twice what we just fought."

Lance stopped and stared at them, his mouth hanging open.

"Only," Hunk muttered. "You say that like this battle was a walk in the park. We're lucky we didn't lose the castle-ship."

"The castle ship's sturdier than you give it credit for," Coran said, bristling. He stroked his mustache. "We'd have lost the _Kera_  long before this old beauty went down."

Hunk rolled his eyes. "Either way. We lost a _lot_ of fighters, and our heavy hitters didn't come through unscathed. Yes, we won, but it cost us."

"And we gained how many allies in the process?" Pidge sent a copy of the map they had up in the background to the projector hovering over the table in this conference room. "This is the Greater Chettok Galaxy last week. Blue is territory we'd already freed from Imperial occupation, red is where we hadn't been able to penetrate." They waited for it to sink in: they'd freed perhaps a quarter of the galaxy over the course of their two-month fight, maybe a little more. Ingav Prison had been a major victory, in terms of trained soldiers and pilots they could add to their fleet--but most of the prisoners had needed time to recover, if they hadn't bowed out of the war altogether. Most of them hadn't taken part in yesterday's battle.

Pidge sat back, staring at the swell of red in the air above them. "Zarkon pulled virtually everything he had in Chettok yesterday. Half these worlds have already overthrown whatever bureaucratic force Zarkon left in place, and the rebellion can move freely even on worlds that are still nominally under Imperial control. They just don't have the manpower to enforce anything anymore."

"Which means our fleet's about to get a massive boost," Lance said. "Zarkon's weaker than ever before, and we're at our strongest."

“Even so...” Allura held her hands up as Lance rounded on her. "I'm not arguing with you, Lance. We mean to push forward, and we agree that we have a tremendous opportunity before us."

"The question is, which move is the right one?" Shiro's eyes slid to Akira, who nodded. "I spoke with Sam this morning. The wormholes, at the end of the battle yesterday? They did go back to the lab."

Keith and Matt breathed in sharply, so perfectly in sync that Pidge couldn't help but stare. They were focused on Akira, too, and Akira answered with a nod.

"I'm missing something here," Val said. "What does it matter that they went back to the lab? Where else would they go?"

"Zarkon's flagship?" Akira suggested. "Military stronghold? Empty space? Doesn't matter, really. The point is, Zarkon went to the lab _directly._  He wasn't expecting us to follow, so he didn't try to throw us off the trail."

Pidge's heart began to pound. "But you didn't make it to the lab. He closed the wormhole too fast."

"And a good thing he did," Lance muttered, glowering at Keith. "Otherwise you'd all be dead."

"The wormhole did close," Akira said. "And we did pop out somewhere shy of the destination. But we were close enough that Red and I could still sense Dark Red. Keturah used a piece of Red to make it, so we're connected, the same way we're connected to Keith and Matt."

"You know where they are," Nyma breathed. "You're _sure?_ "

Akira held up his hands. "I have a general _idea_  of where they are, and the closer we get, the better I'll be able to sense Dark Red, so it shouldn't be too hard to lead the rest of you there. But it's not like I can pinpoint it on a map."

"It's still closer than we've ever been," Pidge said.

"And I think it's a chance we have to take." Shiro glanced at Allura, who nodded, then stood and braced his hands on the table. "Personally and strategically, this is our best next step. Dark Voltron is the biggest threat on the board beside the Vkullor, and the Vkullor seems to have taken our bait. We have a few days there, hopefully long enough for Aransha's team to finish the cannon."

Pidge shut their laptop. "When do we leave?"

"Well, that's the question, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?" Pidge flung an arm out. "We know where they are. Let's _go._ "

"We can find them, yes," Allura said. "But it will take time. Time enough that they will likely be ready for us, no matter how quiet we try to be. Bonds go both ways, and even _if_ the druids at this lab have no way to tell whether Dark Red senses Red approaching, they're bound to have their own security set up."

Lance dropped into his chair for the first time since the start of this meeting, his face scrunching up. "They'll have Dark Voltron in the sky by the time we get there."

"Worse than that," Allura said. "Dark Voltron is one of their most precious resources at this point. If we move to attack, Zarkon very well may just call in all the troops he has. If we're going to do this, we need to find a way to ensure the _only_  resistance we face is what's already there. We can handle Dark Voltron."

"And we need a fleet that can handle the rest of the Empire," Hunk said dryly. "Good luck with that."

It wasn't impossible, though. Pidge could see the shape of it already. If they gathered together the rest of the Chettok resistance, outfitted them with the best ships, put out another rallying cry within the Coalition to spur on any of those who had hesitated before but might be more confident after the success of Chettok...

They could do this.

It wouldn't be easy, but the fleet only had to hold out long enough for Voltron to bring down Dark Voltron. Once the lions were out of commission, they'd need one team to keep Zarkon busy or lead him away, and a couple people on the ground to deal with the guards and disable the master key--something Pidge had known for a long time now would be easier if they had access to the lab where the signal originated.

If the fleet could hold the Empire's attention for thirty minutes, an hour at most, then at least half the paladins could break off from the rescue to offer support.

In theory.

There was more to discuss than that, of course--much more, enough to fill most of the day. They weighed strategies for the rescue, brainstormed when and where to pick the diversionary battle--a battle that very well could turn decisive, if Zarkon didn't pull out once Dark Voltron was compromised.

Pidge didn't think he would. They were driving him into a corner, slowly but surely, and he'd shown how much he hated to lose. If they cornered him well enough, they could engineer a repeat of yesterday's battle, except on a larger scale.

They could crush the rest of the Imperial fleet in a single blow.

Or they could lose it all.

These were the truths they had to acknowledge as they began to piece together a plan. Move quickly enough to keep the momentum, and keep Zarkon from recovering from yesterday's defeat. Move slowly enough to ensure they were ready, and had amassed as formidable a fleet as reasonably possible.

In one week, they were going to stake it all.

* * *

The paladins had had two weeks to plan for the Chettok campaign, which as they'd discovered was nowhere near enough time. There were too many allies to wrangle, supplies to order in, repairs and upgrades to be done, plans to be refined, and more.

Now they were preparing for battle on a much larger scale, and they had half the time to do it.

Meri would have to be blind not to see the cracks forming. Shiro and Allura were sprinting to all ends of the universe, hoping the personal conference would entice reticent allies to commit to this battle, and reviewing drafts of plans for Coran and the Coalition central command in between negotiations. Anyone with a modicum of mechanical talent, and even some without, were being recruited to fast-track repairs following the Chettok campaign and upgrades to rebel equipment. Olkarion was churning out top-of-the-line ships as fast as they could, but with less than a week to go, there was no way they'd have them all done in time.

Most of the paladins were drowning in the logistics, and the most surprising thing about it was that Meri wasn't one of them. Maybe it was that the only thing she could provide any particular expertise on was the portion of their plan that dealt with how to counter any druids Zarkon might have stationed on his and other Princes' flagships. Aside from that, Meri was the designated all-purpose helper, acting as sounding board, an extra pair of hands, or sometimes just a shoulder to cry on when things got too overwhelming.

She had a feeling today was going to wind up as one of those days.

Shiro and Allura were out dealing in politics, as usual; Eli had cornered Keith to record an interview with him, something Keith had been doggedly avoiding for the last three days. Pidge and Matt had gone with Nyma to evaluate a new band of rebels' ships. They had to figure out who got the new Olkari gear and who had something sturdy enough to send into battle as-is.

The rest of the team had gathered here in an empty conference room, each buried neck-deep in their own mire of practical nightmares and Meri doing her damnedest to keep them all sane.

"There has to be another angle, right?" Val asked the room at large. "Something we're not even thinking of."

It wasn't, so far as Meri could tell, a question she expected an answer to. She thought best out loud, and had been narrating her review of Eli's interview series on and off for the better part of three hours, treating it like a debate competition and brainstorming possible rebuttals in an attempt to direct Eli on where and how to focus his next round of interviews. Of the entire room, Val was holding up the best, though Meri noted that she was nearing the start of a downward spiral as her exhaustion turned her arguments circular and made her solutions progressively more salty. Meri would have to goad her into a break soon.

Shay, too, was holding up all right, though she and Hunk kept feeding off each other's anxieties. Shay was coordinating with the Migration, certain members of which had volunteered crystals to power the new Olkari ships and healers to hasten the recovery of the thousands of rebels they'd freed from prisons over the course of the last two months. Both efforts were putting a strain on the Balmera, which in turn was putting a strain on the Migration's relationship with the Coalition that spoke more to the conflicting political opinions within the Migration than without.

Hunk had taken on the gargantuan task of creating an overview of all the repairs, upgrades, and replacements that needed to happen across the fleet so Coran and Coalition leadership could decide where to devote time and resources in these last crucial days. Unfortunately, looking at it all together like this was more overwhelming than helpful, and Hunk was starting to stress about whether they could pull any part of this plan off.

The cycling strains of Hunk and Shay's combined song plucked at Meri like an out-of-tune clarinet in a middle school band concert, and she shot them another concerned glance as she leaned over Lance's shoulder to see the subject of his latest obsession.

"We're not ready for this," he hissed. "I mean, look at this formation! Does anyone really expect _this_  to last ten minutes against Zarkon's fleet? We've got the _Ztygian_ fleet guarding the upper rear flank! They'd stop a determined assault about as well as a bathing suit!"

"They're by the castle-ship, though," Meri pointed out. "Coran's crew is good enough to compensate for their weakness."

Lance's fingers wove into his hair and twisted. "Sure, but what happens if the castle's compromised? What if the weapons along that rim are damaged? A wedge of enemy ships cutting right into the center of our fleet? We'd be done for!"

"How many times in this war has the castle lost power to its weapons systems?" Meri asked. She held up a finger before Lance could answer. "How many times _since Coran's had more than just himself to run this place?_ "

Lance's mouth snapped shut. She could see him running through the war in his head, trying to recall a time in recent memory when the castle had been taken out of commission. Eventually, he huffed. "How many times have we gone up against Zarkon's entire army, huh? We have to be prepared for anything."

"That's literally impossible," Val said--off hand, like she'd only heard the last part, and not the panic that had led up to it. Which, in fairness to Val, was quite possibly the truth.

Meri pinched the bridge of her nose as Lance stared at Val in horror, like she'd just doomed them all with three simple words. Hunk and Shay were both still buried in their separate work, but their song had reached a fever pitch, and Meri figured she had about five minutes before it reduced one or both of them to tears.

"Okay, it's time for a break," she said, snatching Lance's tablet out of his hands and then dodging out of his reach as she did the same to the other three. "Food, first, and then we'll see about getting back to work."

Lance made another grab for his tablet. "I'll eat once I know the fleet isn't going to get torn to shreds in the first five minutes past the opening salvo."

Meri sidestepped, then bopped him on the head with his own tablet. "You want my advice? Let someone else worry about this for a while."

"Let someone _else_ worry about it?" he echoed, incredulous. "Who else is going to worry about this, Meri?"

She stepped back, shoving the four tablets into her messenger bag and the crossing her arms. "Have you looked around lately, Lance? Now that the Greater Chettok's joining the Coalition, we don't just have dozens of worlds backing us up; we have _hundreds._  The fleet is hundreds of thousands strong." She swept her gaze across the room, catching them all watching her with wide eyes. "I know we've been the universe's first and only line of defense for a long time, but that's not true anymore. We're not alone. _You don't have to do everything yourself._ "

She pulled back on the emotion in her voice, straightened her spine and cleared her throat. "Pass it off to someone else for a while. Take a mental break, get some fresh input. I promise you it'll turn out better than if you all just keep putting yourselves into a tailspin over this. So. I'll ask again. Food?"

This time, they all relented, and Meri returned their tablets long enough for them to send a message to someone with their thoughts so far--Lance to a member of the Coalition's strategy board, Hunk to Coran's chief engineer, Shay to her fellow elders, and Val to a representative from the homeworld who'd taken a particular interest in the interview initiative.

When they were done, they all stood a little taller, and Meri couldn't help it if there was a little bit of a swagger in her step as she led them all down to lunch.

* * *

"You have to know they're tracking it, right?"

Haggar's skin crawled at the sound of Keena's voice in her ear. Tonight was another of the Princes' regular gatherings, and like always, Keena was there. She might have her own agenda that took her to all ends of the Empire, but she never missed a chance to one-up her competition.

Haggar loathed that woman, and not only because it was obvious she was plotting something.

Looking down her nose at Keena, Haggar shifted to the side, and turned her attention back to the lieutenants circling one another on the glass floor of the arena below. "What _are_  you talking about?"

"Your pet Vkullor, of course." Keena rested her elbows on the railing before them, folding her hands beneath her chin. "The paladins figured out some way to track it. That's how they knew to divert it the other day before it could reach those poor, defenseless Coalition worlds."

Haggar kept quiet, refusing to acknowledge Keena's words with so much as a twitch. She hadn't _known_  the Vkullor was being tracked, not for certain. She'd certainly suspected it, and had heard rumors to the same effect. But the notion was so very absurd she hadn't wholly been able to believe it.

Keena waited out her silence, then shrugged and turned to go. "Well if you want that thing to become obsolete, you should have just said so."

Haggar whirled, latching onto Keena's wrist as she began to walk away. The woman smiled that insufferable smile of hers, ready to gloat about catching Haggar's attention, but Haggar didn't leave her the time. She tightened her grip, sinking her claws into Keena's skin and plunging into her head in the same motion. Keena's lips parted in either surprise or fear, her wide eyes as good as windows into her inmost thoughts.

For an instant, Haggar contemplated turning Keena inside out, tearing every last scheme and secret right out of her mind and leaving an empty husk behind.

But that would be messy, and Zarkon was so enamored with Keena's turncoat act that he might not give Haggar time to present her findings before he turned on her. (She would win, of course, but now was hardly the time for a messy succession crisis.)

Instead, Haggar kept her eyes on her immediate target. She was in and out in a heartbeat, and back at the railing before Keena could finish her protest.

She wasn't sure Keena knew what had just happened; she was sharp enough that she might have caught it, though many of Haggar's victims were left with no memory of her intrusion. Either way, it made no difference to Haggar. She saw what Keena had meant to suggest. It wasn't a bad idea at all. A risky one, to be certain, but Haggar had quite literally built an Empire on millennia of calculated risks.

She would have a crew begin construction tonight.

* * *

Allura was restless.

Two days remained before they launched their attack, and for the first time all week, Allura found herself with an unoccupied moment. She and Shiro had finished the last of their talks this morning, having decided beforehand than anything more would leave too little time to prepare their eleventh-hour allies.

There was not _nothing_ left to do, but little enough that after catching up with the team on the state of preparations, Allura had allowed herself an hour to roam the castle, remembering the silent days when she'd just awoken and they'd had just six of them to fill these halls. She remembered a time before that, too, when a different hubbub had filled the air.

She missed those days, even now, but it was far easier than it once had been to look back on them with fondness instead of only pain.

The past may be lost to her, but the future lay before, and it was a future she looked forward to with all her heart. A future for all of them, she hoped, and for some, perhaps, more especially than others.

Akira had left after the meeting to do his rounds with the Guard, ensuring they were all ready for the battle to come. He still didn't like that he had to leave them to fly with Red and their paladins into battle. He loved Matt and Keith, but he loved the Guard, too. He loved leading them, and it pained him to step away.

Perhaps that was why Meri had accompanied him tonight, though not without a glance to Allura as though for permission.

Allura didn't mind. She needed this time to herself, and she didn't begrudge Meri her growing fondness for Akira. For all she feigned obliviousness whenever Allura teased her about it, it was plain to see she was enchanted with Akira. As a friend, as a lover, or anything in between--Allura wouldn't presume to know. But he was _something_ to her, something that made her brighter and happier than being without. Allura was content to let them figure it out in their own time; she was secure in her relationship with Meri, and Akira was a good friend, though Allura herself had no feelings for him.

Perhaps that was unfair. She had a great many _feelings_ where Akira was concerned, and a great many more surrounding his relationships with Meri, Shiro, and the rest of the team. She was fond, and she was grateful, and she cared for him, deeply. Her life was better for having him in it, and she was immensely glad that he hadn’t lost himself in his fusion with Red.

But she wasn't attracted to him, and she had no desire to pursue a romantic relationship with him. So, really, she had no business meddling with whatever there may or may not be between Akira and Meri.

That didn't stop her _wanting_ to meddle, to perhaps play matchmaker, just a bit. To at least feel out how Akira might feel about Meri, and about Allura, and about the potentiality of _Akira-and-Meri-and-Allura._

Perhaps that was why she was wandering now, to prevent any kind of ill-considered nudges. The eve of battle was no time to go stirring up trouble. (It occurred to her that both Meri _and_  Akira might well say the opposite, but that only proved that they needed Allura around to balance them out.)

She walked without knowing where she was going, and found herself in one of the many dusty, unused rooms. She paused in the doorway, nostalgia closing in around her throat. This was someplace familiar, though it took her several moments to remember why.

A small room--not cramped, but comfortable, meant for small groups and quiet activities. She suspected there had been more furniture in here before, but it had largely been reclaimed by the castle to fuel reconfigurations elsewhere. All that remained now was a pair of armchairs in one corner and the wide sill beneath the window, slightly curved. Allura had liked sitting there, once upon a time, cradled by the sill and staring out at the stars.

The window was small, though, the sill too narrow for Allura to sit comfortably now. This room wasn't meant for star-gazing, merely to enjoy the natural light when they were landed on a planet, or in close enough orbit to catch reflected sunlight.

No... Allura had spent most of her time in this room in the center, absorbed in something else. She'd sat in the window only when she was waiting.

Waiting for what?

Zarkon.

It hit her all at once, a complicated rush of emotion that left her week in the knees. She turned away from the window, back towards the center of the room. It was empty now, the table that had once stood there long since reclaimed by the castle, but she could picture it still. Small and spartan, it seemed too small for the two antique armchairs that still flanked the empty space.

Then again, the table didn't need to be large--only enough to house three holo-projectors for a standard game of _eshet._ Allura had played the game religiously for several years when she was younger, mainly against Zarkon, occasionally against Coran. When he could hold himself back enough not to frustrate her into quitting.

As usual when she thought of Zarkon, a stab of pain followed close behind--but the anger that once would have followed on the heels of the pain was absent today. What she felt, instead, was closer to pity. Zarkon had been a good man, once, until Keturah manipulated him, turned him against his friends.

She couldn't exonerate him of everything he'd done over the last ten thousand, of course, and she held out no hope for the good man she remembered still being in there to reach. He was a criminal. A tyrant and a murderer, and he would not stop until he was made to. As a paladin of Voltron, it fell to Allura, and to her friends, to stop him. So she would.

But she couldn't hate him as she once had. Nearly every personal vendetta she'd pinned on Zarkon now fell to Keturah. It was Keturah who had killed Allura's mother, Keturah who engineered the war. For all Allura knew, Altea had been Keturah's idea, too. Zarkon had killed her father, but Alfor was no longer the innocent victim she’d once believed him to be.

It was all so much easier when she wanted Zarkon dead, deeply and desperately.

Seized with a sudden fury, Allura turned on the ball of her foot, raised her chin, and called out, "Zarkon!"

His AI materialized before her, and Allura felt... nothing. A hollowness in her chest where the anger should have been. What she found was an impotent, directionless anger--anger at Keturah, anger at the universe for everything it had thrown at her. Anger at Zarkon, she supposed, for not being better--but it was a bitter, weak anger. She wanted to find her rage again, that festering, _seething_ part of her that had carried her through so much of this war.

But it just wasn't there.

"Allura?" Zarkon asked. "Did you need something?"

Allura stared at him, a sour taste in her mouth. She didn't know if she'd called him here in hopes of a fight, or only because she missed him, but she felt foolish for it now.

"No," she said. "Sorry. I was just..." She shook her head. "I'm sorry to disturb you. You can go now."

He watched her, a sorrow in his gaze, but he didn't speak. He knew what he'd gone on to do, and that it had ruined Allura's onetime fondness for him--and he respected her pain. He _would,_ though, wouldn't he? He was, after all, made of memories Zarkon had encoded long before his betrayal

She turned away, flinching as the light changed with Zarkon's departure.

Shiro found her there, some time later, folded into an armchair and staring at the memories of a time long-gone. She wasn't sure if Black had sent him, or if it was his own intuition, but she was both annoyed and profoundly grateful for his presence.

"Ryner, actually," he confessed when she got up the nerve to ask. "She saw that you'd talked to Zarkon."

Allura flushed, turning sideways in her chair to avoid looking at Shiro. It felt so wrong for him to sit in the other chair, across the ghost of a table from her, an opponent, a friend, and an enemy. "I don't know what I was thinking," she said. "I'm overtired, I suppose."

"Can't blame you there," he said. For a few moments, they sat in silence, Allura withdrawn into her armchair, Shiro leaning forward on his knees, looking inches from leaping to his feet, as though he could sense the history of this room. "You know, I've been thinking. I know some of the others are still wanting to be the ones to tackle Zarkon, after the initial fight."

Allura raised her head to peer at him, frowning at what he'd left unsaid. They'd all already accepted that Pidge and Val would be the extraction team. Pidge was their best chance at disabling the master key device, and Val was already somewhat familiar with the layout of the Vindication lab, and growing more so every day as she made repeated trips there with Pidge.

"You want to do it?" she asked. "You want us to take on Zarkon?"

"Don't you?"

She did, but she wouldn't say so aloud. "I thought we agreed I should go to deal with the druids. I'm better equipped than almost anyone else to do it."

"And we're better equipped to deal with Zarkon. This could be the end of it, Allura. We're days away from being able to take out the Vkullor, we're aiming to bring down Dark Voltron. Zarkon's fleet is crumbling. Whoever goes after Zarkon, there's a good chance they'll have an opportunity to end it. Do you really want to leave that to someone else?"

He knew she didn't. She wasn't sure if she wanted to prove to herself that Zarkon was beyond saving, or if she simply wanted to be the one to end him, but she looked at Shiro, and she knew he saw the answer in her eyes.

He nodded. "We'll tell the others in the morning. Now come on. Meri's going to be wondering where you are."

* * *

"You know, I didn't think we'd ever get to do this again," Nyma said, curled up in Matt's chair, Red beside her in Keith's. She'd rearranged the cockpit for tonight--the first time she'd done that since Nyma instituted the junk food and trash movie tradition.

Red rolled a wad of tacky Myruvian dough--a recent favorite of hers--between her fingers. "Me either," she admitted. "I guess Akira's better at balancing this whatever-we've-got than I am."

Nyma flicked a popcorn kernel at her head. "Please. Akira's the one who swan dove into a fusion he didn't fully understand without telling anyone what he was planning because he thought it was the 'right thing to do.' He's no better at self-control than you are."

Red picked at the popcorn kernel, which had stuck in her hair, and contemplated it before popping it in her mouth. "We've both gotten better, then. Akira's the one who figured out how to do this. I think he's known for a while now how much I missed these movie nights."

"Well thank him for me, when you get a chance." Nyma hesitated, watching the action sequence on the viewscreen wind up to a fever pitch. "Unless he's still conscious in there. I'm not really sure how it works."

Red made a face. "You're not the only one. Usually when Akira's in control, I still mostly know what's going on. I sometimes sort of... I don't know. I guess I'm doing what I used to to when the lion body would power down, but I think it works a little different when it's an organic body instead of a mechanical one."

"A _little_ different, yeah," Nyma said, smothering a smile.

Red flipped her off, casually, then crammed her face full of snacks. "When I know I need to focus, or when something catches my attention, I'm there, but the rest of the time I let myself drift. I think that's what Akira's doing now."

"Drifting?"

"Mm."

Nyma frowned. "He's been acting weird lately. Not all the time, but he gets in this mood where he just..." She waved a hand, trying to put into words the impressions she'd gleaned from Meri's thoughts. "He seems upset about something. Sometimes like he's about to have a panic attack, sometimes like he's considering jumping out an airlock."

(That wasn't quite it, though. Meri wasn't afraid that Akira was going to hurt himself, just that he was teetering on the brink of something that might very well swallow him whole.)

Red's silence was telling, and Nyma gave up all pretense of watching tonight's movie.

"What?"

"Nothing."

" _Red._ "

She shook her head. "It affects Akira more than me. He should get to decide who he tells and when."

Nyma arched an eyebrow, silently skeptical.

Red hunched her shoulders. "He _should._  I think that's half the reason he's giving me tonight. He knows he needs to talk to his brother, and he's putting it off."

"Sounds like someone _else_  I know," Nyma muttered.

Red snorted. "What can I say? We were meant to be."

"You're sure you're okay, though?" Nyma pressed. "You'd tell me if you weren't?"

Red smiled in a way that didn't really answer anything, but she reached out to pat Nyma's hand. "I've been through a lot worse than this, Nyma, I promise you that. It's taking some adjusting, but I'll be fine."

"And you'll talk to me as soon as Akira is ready." Nyma poked her in the arm. " _Red._ "

Red held up her hands. "Okay, okay. I promise."

It wasn't good enough, not when Red was so much like Nyma, and far too good at compartmentalizing. But they only had a few days left before the universe was very possibly changed forever, and Nyma didn't want to waste it fighting.

So she relented, and let Red keep her secrets, and went back to her snarky commentary on the movie they'd chosen tonight.

Hopefully they'd both live long enough for Nyma to pester her about this some more.

* * *

Tomorrow.

The shape of it thundered in Coran's mind: a challenge, a storm front.

A chance to change things, forever.

It terrified him, the possibilities tomorrow held. It could easily end in a slaughter, Coran and all his men and the entire fleet crushed against Zarkon's rocky shoreline.

Or they could triumph, decapitate the Empire in one swift strike. That wouldn't be the end of it, of course. After ten thousand years, it would take much more than a single battle to burn out the roots the Empire had put down on countless worlds across the universe. But it would would mean the end of the Empire as a sovereign entity.

Coran left the bridge late, dragging himself away more because he knew it was too late to do any more meaningful preparation than because he felt ready for tomorrow. The best thing he could do right now was rest, and come into the battle with a clear head.

He found Thace in the kitchen, a kettle on the stove and a mug nearby with tea already portioned out.

They shared a look, shared the crushing knowledge that, this time tomorrow, they could be looking at a different universe altogether.

Thace said nothing as he grabbed a second mug from the cupboard, tipped Coran's favorite tea blend into an infuser, and sat at the counter beside Coran to wait for the kettle to whistle. (An old-fashioned way of making tea, when Thace could have set a precise temperature and had it ready much quicker, but Thace preferred it this way. Said it helped him think. Coran had teased him about it more than once--but he still came back, and waited for the kettle's call.)

Unspoken promises hung in the air between them, things they'd never put into words. Things they'd never had to. Coran almost wanted to, tonight. He wanted to give a name to the future they were fighting for, and he was afraid that in doing so he might curse them both.

So he sat, silent, and he breathed in the steam from his tea while it steeped, and he held onto what tomorrow would bring.

* * *

Karen should be in bed.

This thought occurred to her at the same moment as a gladiator charged from the opposite side of the room. She had long since gotten past the point where she froze at the first sign of aggression; two months of intense training following the mission on Alayun had desensitized her to many things (though primarily to Thace attacking her out of nowhere.)

She _was_  tired, though, and that fatigue slowed her reaction time noticeably. She fired two shots, but she did so only a split second before the gladiator crashed into her, knocking her to the ground, where she lay stunned as the training deck reclaimed the "dead" robot.

"Proceed to next exercise?" the room asked in a chipper, overly-helpful voice.

Groaning, Karen hauled herself upright, her body aching. Mostly it was the ache of a good workout--she hadn't taken any bad hits until just now, and even this would hardly bruise. Thace had subjected her to far worse recently.

She _was_  supposed to be taking it easy today, however, considering what the morning would bring. So she waved the room off, standing and holstering her gun as the lighting in the room changed from the dim purplish glow, simulating an Imperial base, to the castle's usual blinding blue-white. A screen near the door lit up with a summary of her training, but she wasn't interested in numbers today.

The numbers couldn't tell her if she was ready for tomorrow.

The door opened as she went to get a water pouch, and all three of her children walked in, Matt and Pidge in civilian clothes, Keith in his armor, breathing just a little too quickly to hide the fact that he'd been training recently.

"Jesus Christ," Pidge muttered, crossing their arms and looking Karen up and down like she'd come stumbling in a three in the morning with a ripped hem, a run in her tights, and alcohol on her breath. "Have you been taking pointers from Keith or something?"

Keith pulled his lip back in a snarl that had no bite, and Pidge flashed a matching snarl right back at him.

"Seriously, Mom," Matt said. "We knew we'd find Keith down here getting his ass kicked to all hours, but I really thought you'd have more sense than that."

Karen planted her hands on her hips, perversely grateful for her armor, which lent her more authority than a sweater and jeans. It was like a courtroom suit, she thought, only better. "I'm sorry, did I miss the part where you two suddenly became the parents?"

"Apparently you did," Pidge shot back, "because guess which two of us are actually taking care of ourselves?"

Karen matched them glare for glare. "I'll have you know I just wrapped up for the night. No lectures needed."

"I know you're worried."

Matt's voice--calm, coaxing, infinitely patient, and in every other way reminiscent of Sam's--stopped Karen't breath in her lungs.

He wrapped his arms around himself and smiled. "Tomorrow's a battle like nothing we've ever faced before. We could finally get Dad back... Or we could all die. You don't want to mess it up." He glanced over his shoulder as he said this, his eyes fixed on Keith, but Karen knew the words were meant for her as well. "You won't."

Karen opened her mouth, but found no words waiting there. She wasn't a soldier, not the way her children were. She'd learned what she could, but the sum total of her experience was a few months on the training deck and a bare handful of days in the field. She _wasn't_  ready for this.

But that wouldn't change tonight, and it made no difference, anyway. If they were going to bring Sam home tomorrow, she was going to be there, even if it got her killed.

"It's going to be okay," Pidge said, looping their arms around her waist. Matt had leaned his shoulder against Keith's, but he looked over as though sensing Karen's eyes on him.

"We've got this." He smiled his father's smile, and despite every argument she could think of to the contrary, Karen couldn't help but believe him.


	39. A New Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The Coalition has won the Greater Chettok Galaxy, but they're not about to stop. They know where Zarkon is holding the prisoners of Vindication, and they've planned an attack on Zarkon's central command to coincide with their run on the lab. The war ends today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, it's finally here. Three and a half years, over 1.8 _million_ words, and so much love and support numbers could never do it justice. It's been such an amazing journey, and I want to thank everyone who's come along for the ride. I mostly wrote this story for me--to play around with characters and a world that I loved and later to get to live the things I wished had happened in canon. But I also wrote it for all of you. For those who left kudos and reviews, who subscribed to the series, who sent me asks on Tumblr, drew fanart, wrote fic inspired by mine, joined the Discord. The last few years have been amazing, and I'm a little sad that it's over--but immensely proud of what I put out. I hope you've enjoyed the ride as much as I have, and that the finale lives up to the hype.
> 
> Duality has finally reached it's conclusion--but buckle up, cause this chapter alone is 50,000 words.
> 
> Trigger warnings: Character death, major character injury. Full chapter summary can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ONOvacvwBb13SZO3-sMtCbQzVEHWP0ej1oHgh7janDQ/edit?usp=sharing), elaboration on the warnings only can be found [here.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/154_CAOesI7siA9UIxV1N9k4BXttn0xl5DzRgaI51X1g/edit?usp=sharing)

The journey was silent, stars streaming by on all sides, a buzz building deep in the bond.

The Red Lion took the lead, straining like a dog on a leash, snapping at the distant call of Dark Red. All it would have taken was a single word and she would have been off like a shot, streaking across the distance in search of the source of her pain.

They all felt it, that pain. As the seconds ticked by and the stars shifted around them and the throbbing ache grew stronger, they couldn't possibly ignore it. Though they hadn't yet formed Voltron--knowing that Red and Akira always withdrew when they did, and that Red and Akira were the only ones who could lead them from the coordinates where they'd tumbled out of Zarkon's collapsing wormhole one week ago today--the bond still hovered in the air, expectant. They were close enough, and focused enough, the paths between minds so well worn that something as sharp as the existence of Dark Red could slip through.

And it hurt.

It hurt like a knife in the side, like a fist around the heart. It hurt like someone had reached inside the paladin bond and set it all ablaze. In a way, that was exactly what Haggar had done in creating Dark Red.

As much as it hurt, though, they couldn't resent it, not even Akira, whose usual rage had quieted to something cold and patient. A hunter lying in wait.

The dagger's blade was no more than a beacon through the dark, pointing them onward toward far more than Dark Red itself. Sam Holt. Rolo. Rax and Zuza.

Somewhere ahead, they were waiting. Shiro had told Sam rescue was coming and to be ready.

They couldn't see it yet, the secret lab where the pilots of Zarkon's lions had been held for so many months, but they knew it was close.

A few minutes more, and they would be there.

A few minutes, and the long-awaited battle would finally begin.

* * *

Coran stood on the bridge of the Castle of Lions, his crew around him speaking in a hush as though afraid to disturb the fragile peace. They were all on standby, the entire fleet ready to strike the moment the paladins gave the word. They couldn't risk moving in early for fear that Zarkon would call on Dark Voltron to help drive back such a sizable force, and if they were moved from the lab before the paladins had engaged, this entire feint would have been for nothing.

Not that they had sold it to their allies that way, of course. Coran and the paladins, indeed everyone on the castle-ship and a handful of their oldest friends, knew that the paladins' sole priority today was to bring their family home at last.

To the Coalition, they'd played up the tactical side of things: a heavy blow to Zarkon's central command while he was still licking his wounds from Chettok, and the paladins pulled out of the spotlight so they would have the freedom to deal with the biggest threat once and for all.

Second biggest threat, in the long run, but the Vkullor had continued on in pursuit of the decoy for the last week without turning aside, and Aransha's team on Klenahn had very nearly finished repairs. They all would have liked it if they could just shoot the Vkullor down and be done with it, but if that had to happen a few days after they lopped off the head of the Empire, so be it.

That was what Coran told himself, at any rate. It was difficult to truly relax when they were putting it all on the line today. They'd already entered the coordinates Kolivan's last remaining spy had forwarded, coordinates for Zarkon's own flagship. They knew the size of the force gathered there.

If things took a wrong turn, there would be no pulling out. They won here, or they died.

(It was a grand irony no one else seemed to notice, but it twisted Coran's lips with a humorless smile. _Victory or death._   _It seems we're playing by Zarkon's rules today._ )

They had no other choice. Zarkon had built the battlefield, laid the groundwork for this confrontation. The paladins, Coran, and the Coalition all sought to change those rules, to twist them as much as possible to their own advantage, but there was only so much they could do.

They'd chosen their battlefield.

Now they would live, or die, upon it.

* * *

The lab's perimeter wasn't marked in any way. A quiet stretch of space. A sun burning in the far distance, a little larger than the other stars but not much brighter. Red had grown increasingly restless as they approached, and those inside along with her--Matt, Keith, Akira, and Meri, who was there in anticipation of the second half of the battle, as Karen was in Green. The embers of Red’s impatience caught on the others' minds and pushed them all to move faster.

They were cloaked, though Shiro didn't expect it to do them much good. The Vindication lab would have the best of the best security, and the paladins had already seen that Haggar had adapted the Vkullor's sensitivity to cloaking tech for use in the last generation of robeasts. There would be something similar here.

But just in case there wasn't, or it wasn't reliable, they were coming in quiet. Shiro expected a fight here; he'd planned on it. But if they could get in and out quietly, stealing Zarkon's pilots away instead of having to bring Dark Voltron down first, Shiro would take that opportunity.

But, as it turned out, his instinct had been right.

He couldn't say where the perimeter was or what form it took: microscopic satellites scanning for intruders or long-range sensors in the lab itself or something based more in druidic magic than technology.

All he knew was that suddenly, Sam was talking.

_Is that you?_

_Probably,_ Shiro said. _We're close. I take it we tripped an alarm of some sort._

He didn't have to see Sam's wry smile to know it was there. _That's an understatement. The entire lab is in chaos. They're taking us to the lions now, I think._

 _We expected that._ Shiro had sketched out the plan for Sam before; there was no reason not to, when their bond couldn't be traced or intercepted and the druids had never before tried to pry information from Sam's mind. As far as they knew, he had nothing of interest to tell them.

So Sam knew that Shiro was expecting a fight. He knew to have Rax ready to connect with the Balmera behind Dark Yellow, to give the paladins a crucial advantage.

"We're close," Allura was telling the others, while Shiro went over the plan one last time with Sam. "The lab has noticed our presence and is scrambling the lions. Be ready."

 _Be careful_ , Sam said at almost the same moment.

 _You don't have to worry,_ Shiro replied. _It might be a bumpy ride for the four of you, but we know how much abuse a lion can take. I promise you're going to be all right._

_I'm more worried about you, actually. They're not going to lose this base without a fight._

Shiro smiled, emotion rising as he strained to pick out the lab among the stars. There was a small, rocky planet ahead, two moons visible in orbit. Was the lab there?

_We'll be careful, Sam, I promise. See you soon._

Sam's voice went soft, as tentative as Shiro's, the both of them afraid that if they spoke the words with too much confidence, they would ruin this chance.

_See you soon._

* * *

Dez kept telling herself she was going to get used to these gatherings.

Oh, the duels and the posturing were nothing special. The same thing happened, to varying degrees, all across the Empire and certainly in the upper ranks of the military. As Prorok's chief security officer, there had been no avoiding it. She'd had to prove herself strong enough to justify her position, and she'd pissed off a good number of soldiers and officer hopefuls, even a couple of Prorok's lieutenants over the years. She knew how this went.

No, what left her reeling, every time without fail, was the people she had to mingle with here. Princes, some of whom she'd encountered before, _all_  of whom had reputations that would scare off most people. They were the kind of people Dez would angle toward, because they each had knowledge and influence she could twist to her own ends--but all together like this, with too many shrewd, powerful people in one space and no way to effectively watch her back? No thanks.

Haggar was the worst of them, in reputation and in presence, and of course Keena always found an excuse to rub elbows with her. The two women didn't exactly like each other. In fact, Dez would bet either would kill the other in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. Why they hadn't, yet, was anyone's guess, but for now they seemed determined to use each other as much as possible.

In case Haggar wasn't bad enough, Zarkon was here today, too. Dez knew she was imagining his gaze between her shoulder blades, but it was a battle not to keep turning around just to see where he was and whether he'd made any move to take her out. Keena was confident Dez wasn't in any danger, that anyone who might have been able to name her had been dealt with before Zarkon and his Questioners entered the scene, but could she really be sure? Agents of the Accords, as a rule, didn't gossip, but sometimes word got around. You knew that Keena had someone stationed on such-and-such a ship, or you suspected that an agent had been involved in the latest disaster to befall the Empire.

Even if they couldn't name Dez, someone might have said something that would point Zarkon in Dez's direction, anyway.

Dez was so on edge she could hardly focus on the duels happening below her on the ostentatious glass floor, and she was one of the first to notice the cowering soldier who scurried up to Zarkon's throne, bowed low, and murmured something that was lost in the hubub of the gathering.

The news narrowed Zarkon's eyes to slits, and he stood and swept from the room without a word.

Haggar watched him go, a scowl twisting her lips, but Keena was so absorbed in her own schemes she only noticed when Dez elbowed her and nodded to Zarkon's retreating form.

"What do you think it is?" Keena asked.

"He didn't look happy," Dez said. "Maybe the paladins just launched another attack."

"And he didn't order all of us to go prepare for battle?" Keena shook her head. "If it's a minor skirmish, he wouldn't go to deal with it personally, and if it's major enough to warrant his personal attention, we'd all be on standby."

Dez frowned. Zarkon hadn't sent his Princes into battle yet, not the ones with enough clout to attend these gatherings and hold a posting in Zarkon's personal fleet. They all knew it was coming; most of the Princes here had been leaning hard on recruitment and on amassing the largest force possible given the Empire's dwindling resources. Their soldiers ran drills and flew simulated battles every day, but they all knew Zarkon was waiting for the right moment to turn them loose. Dez suspected they had a few more major battles before that time came.

Keena wavered, clearly curious what had drawn Zarkon's attention. Both she and Haggar leaned toward the door like they were about to chase Zarkon down and demand an explanation. Keena held herself back, though it clearly pained her to do so. She wasn't here as a spy this time; she couldn't slip away without all the other Princes noticing. And she had no legitimate reason to follow Zarkon. She barely had the right to speak to him, except when he summoned her to elicit more information about the paladins and their Coalition.

More surprising was that Haggar remained behind, too--though she did send her druid away for a brief moment while the current duel dragged on. By the time it was finished and the loser staggered off the arena floor, the druid was back to heal him, and Haggar settled back to wait.

A second soldier stumbled into the room a few minutes later with a cry of, "Lord Zarkon!" that drew every eye in the room. Haggar moved swiftly to intercept, but the poor solider was young and flustered, and his voice carried through a curious silence.

"Lady Haggar! We're under attack! The Coalition--"

Dez had only an instant's warning. A streak of brilliant light cut across the dueling arena’s glass floor, gone almost before Dez could process what it was.

The second shot hit its mark, and a tremor shook the floor as alarms began to blare.

Chaos broke out at once, Princes and their lieutenants racing for the door, pulling out comms that were by custom forbidden during these gatherings and shouting orders to their bridge crews as they raced for the hangars. Dez lost track of Keena in the explosion of activity, then spotted her thirty feet away, her hand locked around Haggar's wrist.

They spoke in low voices, both of them scowling, a silent contest of wills. Dez shouldered her way through the crowd, but she only caught the last of their exchange.

"It _has_ to be now," Keena said. "They're dividing our forces? We have to divide theirs."

Haggar snatched her hand away. "When I want your advice, I'll ask for it."

She stormed away, cloak billowing, and Keena stared after her with a fury Dez had rarely seen from her. She caught sight of Dez and masked it quickly, then turned and plunged into the crowd. "Come on," she called over her shoulder. "We have work to do."

* * *

Pidge spotted the lions before they'd identified the lab itself. Four streaks across the night sky, first distinguishable by the after-burn of their boosters, then by the magenta glow of synthetic Quintessence and their garish paint jobs. The paladins had formed Voltron for the final stage of the approach, so Pidge felt a sympathetic shiver run through the entire team just before they broke apart into Lion-form Voltron.

This was it.

One last fight, playing for keeps.

They weren't leaving here without their dad.

Zarkon wasn't here yet, as anticipated. Pidge didn't expect they'd have much time; the druids here would have alerted Zarkon as soon as they knew the paladins were coming. It had been about two minutes since then. Two minutes to get the pilots from their cell to the hangars and launch. Depending on where Zarkon had been and whether he'd been in the middle of something, he may or may not have reached his own lion already. They had five minutes, at best.

Well, they were going to make the most of those five minutes, that was for sure.

They'd discussed this endlessly over the last few days, trying to decide where to focus their attacks in the early moments of the battle. They might have enough time to bring down a lion, or they might not.

Dark Green was the lowest priority, however much Pidge might hate it. They engaged it, holding its attention, leading it on a chase across the sky and letting it lead them. Their dad was inside, and he was the only insight they would have into Dark Voltron once the battle got going in earnest. They needed that advantage, so Pidge got to play decoy for now.

Hunk and Shay were similarly distracting Dark Yellow, and for similar reasons. Whenever Shiro gave the word, whether Zarkon was able to form Dark Voltron upon his arrival or whether they only needed to give themselves a few moments to breathe, Rax and the Balmera would rebel, freezing Dark Yellow--and all of Dark Voltron--in its tracks.

So Dark Yellow, also, got to stay in play.

That left Dark Red and Dark Blue as viable first targets. Shiro, Allura, Lance, and Nyma had all been in agreement: they would team up against Dark Blue, who was at least less tenacious than Dark Red if not actually much weaker. Keith, Matt, and Akira could handle Dark Red--and now that all bets were off and the paladins had the time and the space they needed to bring Zarkon's Lions down, and the Reds could unleash their full fury, they might honestly bring Dark Red down alone.

Pidge had to focus on their own flying, to keep up with Dark Green and to keep out of its reach, but they let a corner of their mind stray to Val, who was keeping a much closer eye on the rest of the battle. Like them, Hunk and Shay were playing it safe. They were more concerned with avoiding damage than with doling it out, striking only when it seemed their opponent was starting to lose interest.

Red had taken a far more aggressive approach, staying right on Dark Red's tail and taking shots whenever she had the chance. Dark Red, of course, was as quick and slippery as the lion it had been made to copy. Red landed a few hits that Val saw, but the shield absorbed them all. It would give out sooner or later, but likely not until Red had someone else to back her up.

The real fight was happening in the upper atmosphere of the nearby planet, where Blue and Black were dogging Dark Blue. One of them was always on its tail, driving it forward, leaving no room to slow down or turn around. The other circled around, coming in from above or below to try to catch Dark Blue off guard.

They landed a number of hits in this manner, Dark Blue's shields crackling a little more with each one, luminous fissures spreading out from the point of impact and smoothing over a moment later. Each time, the cracks lasted a little longer until, at last, Blue struck too fast, landing an impeccably aimed shot to the weakened point.

The shield burst in a sparkle of lights, and Dark Blue turned suddenly, going on the offensive.

Blue and Black scattered, circling around, Dark Blue hounding Blue, Black trying to get in position for another attack.

There was no sound in space, no rending of metal or pop of pistons, but Pidge caught the moment of impact from the corner of their vision, and even the imagined scream of it set their teeth on edge.

Black had struck with her gravity cannon, aiming well clear of the cockpit so Rolo wouldn't get caught up in it. Dark Blue tried to twist away, but only partially succeeded. The beam caught its hindquarters, twisting one leg at an awkward angle. The metal plating crumpled and peeled back, the booster in that paw went dark, and Dark Blue careened off as it tried to compensate for the damage.

It was slowed, and it was limping, and it couldn't position itself well enough to properly aim. Another minute or two, and Pidge was sure it would have been put down for good.

Instead there was a flash of light from the other side of the battlefield, something Pidge initially mistook for laserfire. Even as they realized that the light was persisting far too much for that, Shay gave a cry.

"He's here!"

Her alarm spread out through the bond, even yanking the Reds' attention away from their fight, but it was Shiro and Allura who first turned alarm to action, twisting the Black Lion around just in time to meet Zarkon's first charge.

The lions clawed at each other, perfectly mirrored, Zarkon's lion as feral as the first Dark Red. Black dropped her head and opened her maw, charging another gravity beam, and Zarkon finally regained his head enough to recognize the threat. He kicked off from Black, blasting her with a laser at the same moment, and shot clear before she released her beam.

The rest of Zarkon's lions disengaged at the same moment, converging on Zarkon himself. The paladins chased after, converging on Black and falling into a conventional Voltron formation once more.

It was faster this way, as it turned out. The lions still had to reconfigure themselves and slot into place, but the bond was already established, the lions already moving as one. The paladins' vision cleared while Dark Voltron was still getting its bearings, and they wasted no time. Red's sword materialized in her grip; the paladins readied it and aimed it at Dark Voltron's heart.

And they charged.

* * *

The Imperial fleet never saw them coming.

Coran was one of the first to strike, along with the _Hope of Kera_  and the heavy-hitters from among the Galra, New Altean, and Chettok forces. They'd opted to lead with a blitz attack, to unleash a wave of destruction against Zarkon's fleet before they could mount a defense, and let the smaller ships trickle in after to engage the Imperial support fleet.

And it had gone off even better than Coran had dared to hope. A dozen ships appeared in the heart of Zarkon's power, unannounced. Coran and Anamuri focused first on bringing down shields, and the rest of the first wave followed up with a concentrated barrage. They'd split themselves into two squadrons, each with one hammer to shatter the shields and five lancers to shred the vulnerable warship.

Both Coran and Anamuri's squadrons took down a warship and had stripped a second of shields before the Imperial fleet gathered itself enough to respond.

Coran called out the next target for his crew to focus on while he himself directed his full energy to holding open the wormhole. Most of their fleet wasn't equipped for FTL travel, and even fewer had teludavs or wormhole instigators that would allow allies the same avenue of travel. Just four of them, now holding open portals in a tight diamond just behind their line. Gunners, bombers, fighters, and the command ship poured out of them to a scene of carnage rapidly turning into a firefight that would decimate both sides.

The Imperial warships--nearly twenty of them, not counting the two, now four, that had gone down--returned fire, and incoming flights had to scatter to avoid being blown away.

"We've got them in a panic," Coran said to Command. He had an open channel to them, knowing that a battle like this was likely to take a few nasty turns, and they all would need to be able to react quickly. His paladins' emotions burned in him, muted somewhat by his own adrenaline, but when he turned his attention their way, he could pick out enough to deduce the state of their fight. Resignation, determination, so perfectly in tune and echoed by other voices that they had to have formed Voltron. "Zarkon has engaged the paladins. That leaves Haggar in command of this fleet."

It was another advantage they hoped they could count on. Haggar must have commanded many of the recent battles, considering how often Zarkon took to the field with his lions. But those were small, outlying forces, not Princes' personal fleets. How many of these men and women considered Haggar a rival, an equal at best and no one with the authority to command them?

She might gain control eventually, but Coran expected resentment and resistance in these early exchanges.

Admiral Ellix nodded, delivering commands to various segments of the fleet, pushing forward in some areas, leaving others to close the line, waiting for...

There.

Wormholes.

"Looks like we've got reinforcements," Coran said. A few of his crew turned toward him, but he gestured for them to wait. Command, too, waited, tension lining every face. Two years' experience fighting this enemy, information from the inside, and a solid strategy to back the Empire into a corner--not to mention Imperial arrogance--made this battle somewhat predictable, at least to start. Haggar might not have the respect of the Princes, but she could command the rest of the military, and she would want to be sure she could crush the Coalition here and now.

She'd already taken too many losses for this battle to end in anything other than a resounding victory for the Empire.

The reinforcements poured from the wormholes, splitting into three streams, each of them aimed for weak spots in the Coalition's rear line. New recruits, under-equipped private forces, holes in the line where the Coalition had pushed too hard. 

As Lance had so aptly put it, they knew in attacking Zarkon's flagship they were painting a target on their back.

At least they could position that target where it would give them some advantage.

The Imperial reinforcements swarmed toward these targets, overconfident and made hasty by an irritable druid nipping at their heels. The Coalition forces who'd played the bait scattered, quickly disappearing behind more heavily armored neighbors or darting beyond the Imperial fighters' reach. They were small, frail ships with weak weapons, but they were fast and maneuverable--either by design or as a result of last-minute modifications by Coalition engineers.

And suddenly those reinforcements who'd thought they were crushing an easy target, dividing an enemy force to trap it between two fleets, found themselves trapped. The three ambush sites were located within easy reach of the castle-ship, angled such that no allied ships fell in the line of fire. Coran gave the signal, and every one of the castle's weapons turned away from the main fleet and instead cut through the reinforcements, tearing them to shreds before they could fully comprehend the trouble they'd landed themselves in.

A cheer went up among his crew as this first wave of attackers crumbled, most reduced to ash by the castle's lasers, the rest fleeing into Coalition ranks and quickly brought down by they very ships they'd thought to hunt.

Coran allowed himself a single breath of relief as he took stock of the situation and conferred with Command. Things were going well so far. The Coalition controlled the battlefield--for now--and had dealt heavy losses in their opening salvo against both the main fleet and the reinforcements.

They were still outnumbered, and caught between the two fleets. They had room to maneuver, for now, and the Empire didn't have enough ships to fully pen them in, so they were unlikely to become surrounded, but they were far from safe.

A new light split the air, not the steady pulse of laserfire or the massive beam of ion cannons but the filament-thin branching trees of druidic lightning. It burst from the enormous ring structure that surrounded the _Emperor's Pride_  and from the midline of the _Eryth_ , Haggar's personal ship, frying flights of fighters that had ventured too close.

Coran grimaced. Druids. The last significant line of defense the Empire had in this fight. They would sap the power from any attacks that came too close and vaporize ships that tried to break through their perimeter--but they had a severely limited range. The _Pride_ and the _Eryth_  were untouchable for now, along with a few of the Princes that trusted Haggar, or at least respected her, enough to stick close inside the umbrella of her protection.

They had plans to deal with that, too, but it would need to wait until the paladins finished with the first phase of their own fight.

Until then, Coran chose other targets, brought down their shields, reduced them to scrap metal. There were more ways to kill an Imperial fleet than to simply behead it. If anything, Zarkon and Haggar without their fleet were less dangerous than this fleet without their commanders.

* * *

Dark Voltron seemed somehow diminished today. Shay was unsure what it was; the paladins' lions had outclassed Zarkon's for some time now, even with the power boost Zarkon gained in the Dark Voltron formation. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, today, Zarkon had nowhere to run to. They had found his lab. They had besieged his flagship.

More than that, they had nothing, today, to divide their attention. For months now, they had only faced Zarkon's lions in the context of a larger battle, where Zarkon was more interested in distracting the paladins and putting them on the defensive than in having a straight fight.

Perhaps he had known he would lose.

Today, there were no ships for Zarkon's lions to attack. No allies nearby in peril to cry out for the paladins' aid. They were here for Dark Voltron and Dark Voltron alone, and they would only leave triumphant.

Dark Blue was limping, dragging on Dark Voltron. The blow the Black Lion had dealt caused its connection to Zarkon's lion to sit askew, the power flow and maneuverability both suppressed. Shay saw this through Hunk's analytic eye. He knew it was not a fatal wound, perhaps not enough on its own to mean victory for the paladins.

But it was _a_ wound, and it put Zarkon at a disadvantage.

It distracted him, which was all the more the paladins needed. They were not looking for an extended battle here. They had no reason to draw it out.

They assessed the situation--Shiro and Lance batting strategies back and forth, refining them as Hunk provided technical observations and Allura Quintessential, as Pidge and Val tracked their position relative to the lab visible now and again on the surface of the nearer moon, as Keith and Matt and Akira bent all their will toward Dark Red and the echo of Quintessence within.

This version of Dark Red was not so willful as the first, not a Vkullor on a leash, untamed and straining for freedom.

It _was_  a sliver of Red, twisted and tortured and stripped of autonomy--but inexorably linked to Red herself, and helpless to resist echoing her rage and her restlessness.

Another distraction. Zarkon was struggling.

It was time.

The order that was not an order swept outward from Shiro, reflected in every mind even as Shiro spoke the words to Sam, who was and had been a shadow in the depths of the bond, as familiar and as foreign as Akira himself.

_Sam, tell Rax to do it now._

Val vanished from their collective mind at the same moment. Or rather, she went silent, plunging beneath the surface, and Shay followed her into the Heart. Hunk sang to her as she descended, yielding control of Yellow to him for now.

There was little aid the paladins could offer to Zarkon's pilots, but this much they could do.

Val found her on a cliff in a sun-baked plain, mountains in the distance and a canyon below, so deep Shay could hardly make out the glimmering river far below, so wide the opposite cliff face seemed muted by a haze. Yellow's song rumbled in the stone beneath Shay's feet, tracing caverns and caves and tunnels that were not the tunnels of Shay's youth but felt equally familiar. The song echoed the length of the canyon, which twisted away to the west, toward the mountains, and to the east, toward a distant sea.

For an instant, as Val arrived, Shay could hear the crash of waves, smell salt on the air--the scent of a home she'd never seen, borrowed memories of islands and beaches and sunshine that had once seemed the most fantastical thing in the universe.

"You ready?" Val asked.

Shay took her hands, stumbled a little as Val brought her to the salt-wind and the crashing waves. An island Shay had heard described many times before, with a white tower on a cliff overlooking the sea.

"Will it work?" Shay asked.

Val spread her hands. "He's close," she said. "That should help."

It was not an answer, but Shay knew Val had nothing better to give. She had never done this before with Shay, and they'd had no time to practice. Sam had explained Rax's plan in detail just two days ago, and Shay had hesitated to suggest something she wasn't sure would do any good.

She had to try, regardless.

She thought of her brother, sang his name, his life, the strains of him that had so long been missing from Theros' song. And she pressed her hand to the tower, Val's laid over top.

She heard him, somewhere out beyond the horizon.

And then, all at once, his song was inside her heart once more.

Rax's song faltered, for a moment, as Shay materialized inside Dark Yellow's cockpit. He stared at her, wide-eyed and speechless, his body moving of its own accord in the pilot's seat, an oppressive presence in the air around them that could only have been Zarkon's mind.

"Shay," Rax whispered.

Shay flung her arms around him, an aching melody rising within her without prompting. Rax returned the melody, though he seemed uncertain how to respond to the embrace. She clung to him a moment longer before pulling back, clasping arms, and pressing her forehead to his.

Val touched her arm, a feather-light sensation noticeable more for Val's mental nudge. "I'm going to buy you as much time as I can," she said, and lingered only until Shay nodded before vanishing like an interrupted dream.

"Shay," Rax said again, but Shay clung onto her purpose in coming here and took him by the hand.

"Sam said you know the Balmera they used. I will lend you both my voice and my Quintessence, but I will follow your lead. Do what you must, and I will aid as I can."

He nodded, the strains of a homesick song fading as he closed his eyes and began to sing instead an unfamiliar song. Shay recognized enough of it to follow the melody, as she was learning to follow the melody of the other Balmera she had visited. She fell into harmony with him, standing at his back with her hands on his arms, pouring her Quintessence into him. It was difficult, when she was here only in spirit, her body and most of her Quintessence back in the Yellow Lion, but she gave him what she could.

She sensed, at first, only the silence where the Balmera's responses ought to go. Rax sang, but if anything answered, it was lost to Shay's ears.

The more he sang, however, the more she felt it--not a sound she could hear, but a current that churned within her. Mourning and resignation and determination. This Balmera, in many ways, was already dead. Shay was uncertain if she knew that, if she comprehended what had happened to her and what was yet to come. She seemed to.

She seemed, at least, to know enough to say goodbye.

Shay heard, at last, one faint strain of a Balmera's song, as the oppressive Quintessence in the air began to seize up, freezing in the arctic winter of the Balmera's defiance.

Her song, Shay thought, sounded very much like a lullaby.

* * *

Keena and Haggar parted ways in the initial chaos as the Coalition's attack rocked the _Emperor's Pride._ Both, clearly, had a task in mind. Either could be disastrous to the fleet visible now and again through the panels that lined this corridor, designed to give a view of the vastness of Zarkon's domain.

Dez couldn't chase them both at once.

She made her choice in an instant, trusting her gut when it said Haggar was the more immediate threat. Keena had always played the long game, setting things up well in advance. Even if today was the day she chose to turn against the paladins, they would still have time to react. Dez would have time to wheedle it out of Keena and figure out how to thwart her.

She hopped.

What she _knew_  was that Haggar was as ruthless as she was dangerous. When she acted, she acted with the intent to kill, and the Coalition would have far less time to react.

As Keena vanished into the crowd, Dez prayed she'd make the right call. Keena still needed the paladins to win this war, after all. If she wanted to plot and scheme and plant herself on the throne when this was all done, so be it.

Haggar was more difficult to follow than Keena, and Dez had a brief moment of panic when she dissolved into smoke. She reappeared a short distance ahead, however--clear of the crowd of Princes racing back to their own ships to direct the battle from the front line, but no farther than that.

Curious.

She must be anticipating a long battle, and one she would need to be personally engaged in, if she was conserving her energy now. Dez was grateful, regardless. She nearly lost the witch again while she struggled to break free from the crowd, but once she found open air, she was able to catch up and trail Haggar to a comms deck only a handful of people, hand-picked by Zarkon, were permitted to use.

This was even more curious. Dez had expected Haggar to head straight for the command deck to advise Zarkon or to take over if wherever he'd disappeared to wasn't related to the battle. (Was it? Surely if he'd realized they were under attack, he'd have told the Princes, but where else could he have gone, and what were the odds that it would come just before the Coalition struck?)

Too many questions and no way to answer most of them. Dez tucked them aside for later and took up post outside the comms deck, her back to the closed door like she was standing guard. The door was too thick for much sound to carry through, but that was a common enough problem in the Empire or, she suspected, anywhere else. She had a microphone embedded in her gauntlet, which she pressed to the door behind her. Her earpiece automatically filtered out some of the white noise and amplified the rest.

She'd spotted only a couple of comms techs in the brief glimpse she'd gotten of the room, and these remained quiet as they set up a call for Haggar. To whom? The call must have been both urgent and sensitive to have detoured her away from the battle at hand, but Dez didn't recognize the voice on the other end.

"Lady Haggar!" (Surprised. Frightened. It must have been someone low-ranking to be so shaken by the mere sight of her.)

"Strike now," Haggar said.

A moment of silence. "Now? But--Lady Haggar--"

" _Now._ "

"We've only just finished construction, Lady Haggar. Without running the tests, a wormhole of this size could--"

"I do not like repeating myself." Haggar's voice was still low and measured, as ever, but it shut the man up at once. "Strike now. The druids I sent to you know what I've asked of them. If they die, they die knowing it was a more merciful death than I would have given them for defying my orders."

"Y-yes, Lady Haggar. Where are we sending it? To your location?"

"Don't be an idiot." For the first time, Haggar's voice grew sharp--not with fear, not overtly, but Dez knew her well enough to know she didn't show fear. Whatever was behind this plan of hers, it was bad enough to rattle the best of them.

Dez turned it over, trying to piece it together. Recent construction on what sounded like a wormhole generator on such a scale it required multiple druids to power--and it still might kill them. What could she possibly need a wormhole that large for? Some new weapon, maybe? Or--

Oh, no.

"I'm sending you the coordinates now," Haggar said. "See that it's done."

Dez took off at a sprint as Haggar ended the call. If she found Dez out in the hall, it was over--but even more than that, she needed to get a message off to the paladins. A massive wormhole, a weapon Haggar didn't want anywhere near her.

She'd found a way to move the Vkullor across the universe almost instantaneously.

Dez ducked into the first empty room she found that contained a computer. A glance over her shoulder showed she hadn't been followed. Small mercies. She logged into the computer with the spare credentials she used for all her riskier work, setting up a few hasty defenses while the messaging system loaded. There wasn't time for her usual caution, so this very well might be her unraveling, but she would at least make it difficult for them. Perhaps she could wheedle a scheme or two out of Keena before the end.

 _Haggar has wormhole for Vkullor_ , she typed. _On the move. Will update with target if I can._

Short. Blunt. She wished she had more information to give, but the more time the paladins had to mount a response, the better their chance to save billions of lives.

She sent the message to everyone whose contact information she had: the headquarters on New Altea, Kolivan's personal line, and the Castle of Lions. She hoped one of them was in a position to act.

After she'd sent the message, Dez hesitated. Haggar had mentioned coordinates. Could she hack into the comms line she'd used, extract those coordinates for the paladins? By the time the Vkullor's target knew it was coming and sent a distress call to the Coalition, it could be too late. A motivated Vkullor could destroy an entire planet in moments.

Cracking a top-tier comms line was risky, if she could pull it off at all, but it could be the only chance those people had.

Before she could begin her search, a shadow condensed behind her. Dez tensed, braced to move, but something sharp pierced her back.

"I thought I sensed an audience," Haggar whispered in her ear. Her dagger dug deeper, and lights burst across Dez's vision. "I wish I could deal with you properly, make Zarkon see his folly in trusting you and your friend Keena, but alas."

The dagger disappeared, and its absence left Dez reeling, a chill in her center and a slow, hot drip down her spine.

"I'm afraid I don't have that sort of time."

Static burst in Dez's ears. The scent of ozone filled the air.

Black lightning filled her vision, searing her from the inside out, grasping fingers that clawed at her mind, at her heart. The wound in her back twinged as she arced beneath Haggar's lightning, but the pain of it was nothing next to this fresh agony.

It drained her too quickly to fight it. Her vision darkened. Her limbs grew heavy. She knew in that moment that it was over. Haggar wasn't one to show mercy, and Haggar in a hurry wouldn't so much as play with her food.

At least she'd gotten that first message off. At least that poor planet had a chance.

* * *

Hunk was the first to spot the change in Dark Voltron: first a lag in the left foot's response time, relative to the right. It was a skip, a momentary falter. Voltron surged in, and Zarkon responded in a panic. For an instant, he brought the machine back under his control, unleashed with every weapon at his disposal.

Then Dark Yellow seized up entirely. This time, Zarkon couldn't shake it back to life.

Shay returned to Yellow, and Val to Green, both their minds lingering inside Dark Voltron and pulling the rest of the team that way, too. Shiro steeled himself, curled his fingers around Sam's voice in his head--a connection, but not a distraction.

They couldn't say what Rax and that Balmera had done; not Sam, not Shay, and certainly not Shiro--but whatever it was, it was _damn_  effective. Dark Yellow's eyes were black pits, the length of her hanging like dead weight from Dark Voltron's body. Dark Blue struggled to direct it where it meant to go, but everything was off-center, off-balance, floundering as the darkness spread up the left leg and into the core, a poison Zarkon didn't know how to fight, the leg a gangrenous weight that slowed them, dragged them down as Voltron pounced.

Red's sword pierced Dark Voltron's core. Nyma aimed a shot at the wound in Dark Blue's flank where they'd nearly brought it down earlier. Dark Red's sword shattered upon Green's shield.

The battle had already been decided, but it was only now that Zarkon seemed to realize it. He wavered, but couldn't pull back, not with one leg dead and the other dying, not with a shield that must suddenly feel feeble when Zarkon had never taken a defensive stance before.

He wavered, and then a great, deep darkness seeped into the spaces between his lions, and he cast them off like yesterday's toys and broke for open space beyond the lab's defenses.

The remaining lions floundered, Dark Green and Dark Red struggling to right themselves like swimmers caught in a riptide, the other two drifting toward the moon, and the lab, below.

Voltron broke apart the moment they registered what was happening. They'd planned for this; hoped for this, but there was still a flare of panic as the Black Lion split away in pursuit of Zarkon.

" _Takashi!_ "

Akira's voice, breathless for a reason no one could name. The weight of unspoken words, of secrets buried too deep, of not enough time, _never_  enough time, rose to strangle them all.

Allura reached out for Akira's mind, soothing like a brush of lips against a forehead, against a cheek.

"We'll be back," she said, and they vanished into the dark.

There was no time to pray for their safety, though they all ached with the fear that someone might not make it home, not when so many of them were staring down impossible odds.

One step at a time.

They were still connected, for now, the Voltron bond holding strong as a wormhole whisked Shiro and Allura away. They had a few moments more, at least. Long enough to catch the last two lions in a careful crossfire, to bring them down and guide them toward the lab below. Dark Yellow had left a trench through two of the hangars, Dark Blue landing just clear of the compound. With a little course-correction and some careful guesstimation, the paladins brought the last two down the in same perimeter--far enough away that Pidge might have some time with the lab's control equipment before the pilots came to defend their captors; close enough that when their strings were cut, Pidge, Val, and Karen would be able to get to them all before anyone else.

They were just about to split up--the Green Lion to the moon and the lab, the rest back to the fleet and battles on a grander scale--when an emergency call from the castle came in on every line.

Lance whirled Blue around, already aiming a wormhole as Coran began to speak. In the distance, a star burst alight and then faded. A streak of silver fell toward the moon below.

"Thirty seconds, Coran!" Lance called. "Whatever's happening, we'll be there soon."

"It's not here," Coran said, breathless, frightened like the paladins had rarely heard him. "It's the Vkullor."

* * *

Hunk and Shay volunteered to go.

It wasn't a question so much as a need. They'd seen the aftereffects of a Vkullor attack; they'd walked the halls of a Balmera in agony, pulled the dead and dying from the wreckage of an unwinnable fight. They _knew_ what was at stake here, knew it intimately.

Those dead filled the song as Shay plunged into a wormhole, Hunk abandoning his seat at the controls to go to the gliders in the back. They had no time to waste on a landing, no time to spare at all except that they didn't yet know _where_ the Vkullor had gone, only that it was going, and that they had minutes at best before the death toll was in the billions.

Lance had offered to come as backup; Keith and Matt had protested that the job should fall to them, as they flew the fastest lion. Part of Hunk wished he'd listened to these offers and gone where death wasn’t quite so likely the outcome.

But there were too many battles to fight to spare another lion for this mission, and it wouldn't have done any good, anyway.

Klenahn loomed large in Hunk's vision as Shay neared the edge of the atmosphere and Yellow opened her mouth. This was the place where Hunk had nearly died; the place he could hardly endure without succumbing to a panic so large it left no room for the rest of the universe.

But there was a weapon down there, almost complete and the only chance they had to stop the Vkullor for good. It had to be Hunk, and it had to be now.

Hunk clutched the handlebars of the glider and leaped from Yellow's maw, the wind catching him, trying to toss him. He ducked head and shoulders behind the glider's windscreen and fixed his eyes on the mountains below. A yellowish haze coated the land, nearly imperceptible. He hadn't noticed it the first time they'd come here, and he'd avoided looking the second.

He saw it now, the faintest tinge to the air, the subtlest of fog. Just a whisper to warn of the poison waiting below.

The comm line opened, a moment of clear silence seeming to stretch behind him like a tunnel through the atmosphere, a narrow core of vacuum tying him to clarity.

"We found it," Coran said. "Olkarion."

Hunk's heart sank, its leaden weight fighting against the lightheadedness of his plummet. Olkarion. He wasn't sure where he'd expected Haggar to send her Vkullor--after the Balmera, except that they'd been even more careful about their location since the last attack; to Earth, except that it had stronger anti-wormhole defenses than any single planet except New Altea.

Olkarion had those defenses, too, but not as strong. At speeds the Vkullor traveled, their exclusionary zone bought them ten, maybe fifteen minutes. They had a much stronger defensive force than most of the Coalition, enough to protect themselves and dedicate a considerable fleet to the cause at the same time. It should have been enough to protect against any threat.

They'd never thought about the Vkullor, not for themselves. It had never come within a year's travel of Olkarion. They shouldn't have _had_  to worry.

Somewhere in the sky overhead, Shay opened a wormhole. The Voltron bond had faded, either because of the distance or because Pidge and Val had left Green to delve into the Vindication lab in search of the controller keeping Sam, Rax, Rolo, and Zuza locked out of their own bodies.

The song remained, though, and Hunk and Shay's bond with Yellow. It was enough for Shay's disbelief to creep up Hunk's spine. The Vkullor waited on the other side of that wormhole. She _knew_ how deadly it was.

And she was going to face it alone.

Hunk sang to her, the wind howling in his ears, his eyes glued to the mountains, and to the tiny, pale patch of the one-time Klenna camp that marked the main entrance to the cavern. _Distract it,_  he told her. _You don't need to face it. I'll be as quick as I can._

Shay returned the song, quick and frightened and stunned. She knew everything Hunk did about the Vkullor, everything they all did; when their five lions were the only things that could provide even an imitation of defense against something like that, they all had to be experts. So she knew exactly how far she could be from a Vkullor and still tempt it with her cloak, and she'd opened her wormhole just within that radius from the Vkullor's estimated location. She had time.

She had a little.

The song faded to a whisper among the stars as the wormhole whisked Shay away. Hunk closed his eyes and wished her the best, wished her luck and skill and speed. She was by far the better pilot between them, as he was the better engineer. It had to be this way, and switching places with Shay would have only hurt their chances.

That knowledge would be cold comfort if anything happened to Shay out there.

The mountains raced up to meet Hunk, and he kept his gaze steady on his target--on the broad, flat, pale plateau of the camp, on the Olkari ship parked on that old airfield, on the dark wrinkle in the mountainside that was the tunnel entrance. There were a few vents to the cavern below, many of them collapsed, all of them too small to enter at speed. The Olkari crew below had cut a secondary entrance somewhere north of here, but Hunk didn't know where it was and it wouldn't have saved him any time.

A weapon like this needed no mouth, no shaft carved through the mountains--its beam was deadly, but not destructive, and it passed through stone as easily as, they hoped, it would pass through a Vkullor's hide.

Didn't mean Hunk didn't wish there were an easier way into that cavern that lurked a full mile beneath the Klenna camp.

A _faster_ way.

He waited as long as he dared to haul backward on the glider's controls, lifting the nose and firing the repulsors. The sudden change in momentum threatened to shake him loose, but he held on, bracing his feet on the glider's frame. He may have waited just a touch too long; the landing was rough, jarring his teeth as the bottom of the glider scraped against stone and skidded across the ground toward the mouth of the tunnel.

Hunk didn't care. He hung on until he'd slowed enough for his armor to absorb the rest of the momentum, then kicked the glider away, rolled, and launched back to his feet. His head was spinning, and he slammed his shoulder against the tunnel wall as he struggled to remember how to run straight, but he shook it off and kept moving.

The elevator platform loomed ahead, an operator snapping to attention at the sight of a paladin in armor charging his way. He moved to prepare the platform to descend, but Hunk waved his arms over his head. "Don't bother!" he called.

The Olkari man frowned at him, the ambient light inside his helmet accentuating the furrow of his brow.

Hunk didn't slow to give him an explanation. The elevator would take half an hour to descend, and once it moved from this upper platform into the shaft, it left mere inches between the railing and the stone. Hunk's only choice was to get around it now.

Ignoring Hunk's command, or perhaps misinterpreting it, the operator got the platform moving as Hunk's feet pounded against the metal floor, but Hunk didn't slow. He planted his hands on the railing and vaulted over into the dark shaft on the other side.

It was only once he was airborne that he stopped to consider the ramifications of his action. The elevator shaft stretched for nearly a mile, no platforms, no ropes or ladders to cling to; only a single track embedded in one wall.

The jets in his armor could only slow him so much, and his armor wasn't meant to cushion a fall at terminal velocity.

His one saving grace was that the shaft sat on a slight angle, moving deeper into the mountain as well as lower. After one weightless moment, his flailing feet found the sloped wall. He tumbled once, kicked off, fired his jets just long enough to adjust his angle in the air. This time when he hit, he hit heels-first and immediately leaned back, skidding on heels and elbows down the shaft. The sparse lights embedded in the tunnel wall were apparently programmed only to come on when the elevator was near, so the only light Hunk had was the beam of his headlamp and a pinprick of yellow far below, where the shaft opened up into the vestibule attached to the main cavern.

That distant yellow light swelled far too quickly, slow-motion flash lightning accompanied by the thunder of a small rock slide loosed by Hunk's passage. He leaned further back, letting friction slow him as much as it could. He was still sliding too fast, _way_  too fast, his heart in his throat and his vision tunneling as he thought that, well, at least he'd warned Aransha that he was coming. If he died here, she'd still know she had to take the shot.

He hoped this cannon was close enough to done that she'd even have the chance.

The ground appeared, quite suddenly, beneath him. Hunk shoved against the wall, flared his jets. It probably spared him some broken bones, but he still hit hard, and tumbled, and slammed into a heap of rubble that had been cleared from the cavern but not yet taken to the surface and dumped over the cliffside.

For long seconds, Hunk lay there aching, marveling at the fact that he was still breathing, however painful the act was. He'd survived the getting here.

Unfortunately, the getting here was the easy part, and however hasty his entrance had been, it had still taken _time_ \--too much time when Shay was out there alone with a Vkullor.

Hunk picked himself up off the floor, trying to favor two aching legs at once and clutching a rib that was probably bruised at least, his head still spinning. He had the presence of mind to realize that this was the state he'd landed himself in _after_  his family had siphoned off the pain and whatever else. His dull headache and fading dizziness didn't feel like a concussion, but that didn't mean it wasn't, and he silently apologized to his family.

It would be worth it if they could bring the Vkullor down.

The vestibule here had been set up as a control center for the cannon itself, which took up the entirety of the main chamber. Even from here, even obscured by dozens of people flitting around in a panic trying to finish up work they'd planned to take another week or more, Hunk could see the changes. The cavern glowed, gold and silvery lights emanating from the panels and lenses that lined the walls. It made the whole place feel like the inside of a disco ball, and that was _with_  a tinted wall of plexiglass or something similar set up between here and there. Whenever a door in the tinted wall opened, a spear of blinding light flashed through the control chamber, and everyone who passed through had their visors tinted so dark Hunk couldn't tell if everyone here was Olkari.

He thought they were.

He wondered if they'd heard where the Vkullor had been sent.

Aransha met Hunk near the elevator shaft, doling out orders to three different people, who each split off in turn. The last left just as Aransha reached him, taking his hand and clapping his shoulder at the same time, her face grim.

"Is it ready?" he asked. "Where do you need me?"

Aransha raised both hands in a soothing gesture. "The cannon has been operational for two days now. We'd planned on running a few more days' worth of tests before we had to fire it, but we cut it short. A few more minutes and it will be ready to go."

"But?" Hunk pressed.

"The targeting system isn't finished."

Hunk gaped at her, uncomprehending. "What do you _mean,_ the targeting system isn't finished? How were you planning to fire this thing?"

"Through a wormhole," Aransha said, just enough of an edge in her voice to stop Hunk's anger in its tracks. "The Klenna people built this cannon to defend themselves. We had to add on a teludav array. It was never going to be portable, and we couldn't count on luring the Vkullor into range, especially not if we didn't want to risk losing everything."

Hunk floundered for words as he stared at her, and at the flurry of activity all around. "And you don't have anything?"

"Ideas," she said. "Theories. We've been working on it for months, but we've only just begun to build prototypes of a couple of our best designs. Drones to send ahead to help us aim the wormhole, a movable portal to make adjusting our aim easier. Even if we could finish those prototypes, we haven't had a chance to calibrate them, much less test for accuracy." She shook her head. "We can fire. But we'll be shooting blind."

Hunk closed his eyes, the words physically paining him. "You know where it went, right?" Aransha shook her head, and Hunk cursed under his breath. "She sent it to Olkarion."

The color drained from Aransha's face, and Hunk had to reach out and steady her. She recovered admirably, glancing around at the frantic motion of her team. "We'd work just as fast regardless," she finally said, sounding faint.

"I know." Hunk squeezed her arm. "Point me in a direction and I'll get to work. We'll have this ready to go in a flash."

* * *

Paladin bonds never really went away.

It was something Allura had always known but never really examined. The Black Lion and Zarkon were still sensitive to one another, and though Black had shut Zarkon out long ago, rejected him utterly, overridden his commands and left him in the vastness of space, there was still a part of her that knew he could take control of her again. All it would take was a moment of weakness, the right kind of leverage, and he could twist their atrophied bond into a leash.

Red had severed her bond with Keturah, after all, and Keturah had still found a way to use it.

These old bonds were a danger, but a distant one. Zarkon was never close enough to leverage his will against Black’s, not since they'd all been taken back near the beginning of all this--and even then, the three of them together were enough to resist his direct control. Keturah had been more crafty, Red more vulnerable, but whatever she'd done in fusing with Akira seemed to have afforded her another layer of protection, as though Akira were gatekeeper to whatever remained of their bond.

Those bonds never truly died, though, and Allura had never seen that as clearly as she did now.

They'd chased Zarkon into that first wormhole not knowing what awaited them on the other side, but Zarkon had been more shocked by the flash of laserfire and flood of Coalition and Imperial ships than either Allura or Shiro. He'd retreated to his seat of power, expecting security, and had found a bitter struggle.

Allura tasted his fear on her tongue as she and Shiro gave chase, keeping as close on his tail as the battle allowed. An echo of his paladin bond hung in the air around them; Allura wasn't certain if that was Zarkon, wholly focused on the Black Lion in a way he hadn't been since building his own Voltron to rival what he'd lost, or if it was Black, opening herself up to every risk and every advantage in an effort to put a stop to Zarkon's reign of terror once and for all.

Perhaps it was both, or perhaps it was only that it had been a long time since Black and all her paladins had danced quite so intimate a dance as this. The battle around them was as much white noise, notable only because it kept threatening to come between Black and her prey.

The bond was incomplete, but even so it resonated. Allura knew where Zarkon had set his sights before he turned, knew which crossfire he would dive into to try to shake his tail. It wasn't the fine level of detail she sensed from Shiro, and not quite so instantaneous, but it was enough to anticipate his moves.

Every bond went two ways, however, and Zarkon remained always one step ahead, just far enough out of reach that they couldn't end him.

 _He's running,_  Allura thought, before she saw Zarkon duck behind one of his own gunners, before she felt him twist and take off in a new direction. He was feeling claustrophobic here, harried from too many sides, and after the loss of Dark Voltron, he didn't like to have the paladins so close on his heels in so much chaos.

Five paladins appeared in the midst of the battle at the same moment Zarkon opened a wormhole to somewhere else. Allura couldn't spot Blue and Red in the chaos, but she impressed calm and confidence on the minds within.

Then Shiro punched through the gunner, leaving its corpse behind as he chased Zarkon into the unknown once more.

The unknown, perhaps, but something immediately familiar. Even before they came out the far side of the wormhole, the portal nipping at Black's heels as she charged through, Allura felt the pull of it. Saw constellations she hadn't thought she'd ever see again--constellations she could name, whose shapes she knew from star maps and holograms, but whom she'd rarely had the chance to trace in the sky.

Her eyes went at once to the ruined planet before them--not so much a ruined planet anymore. Debris in orbit gave only a vague suggestion of the planetary rings that had long since crumbled away, and the dark side of the planet she could glimpse on the horizon was well and truly _dark_ , not a city in sight to chase away the night.

The planet itself was thriving, though. Green, blue, and gold, dazzling in the light of a distant sun, the scars of an ancient war worn away by millennia left to its own devices. She was sure if she looked closer, she would see those scars still. New craters, new chasms, a different array of flora and fauna, the kind that had weathered Zarkon's attacks and risen to fill the gaps left behind by the dead.

Altea.

Shiro's breath had stilled along with Allura's, his eyes drawn after hers, the ache resounding in the bond. Zarkon's lion slammed into them, shattering the moment and leaving them both rattled. Allura tried to pull herself together, to drag herself out of the past, latching onto Shiro as her anchor in the present.

The call of Altea remained, dragging her eyes toward the planet, its Quintessence strong enough even at this distance that she felt it, as though the planet itself were reaching out to pull her down.

Shiro gently prodded her, reminding her that this was Zarkon's ploy. He'd come here, out of all the universe, in an attempt to get inside her head, to throw her off her game.

She knew this, but knowing it didn't stop it working.

She didn't know why, but she'd thought Altea was gone forever, not just her people but the planet itself. To see it here now...

It was one more reason to fight. She gripped her control pedestals, closed her eyes, let the bond resonate inside her, stronger and closer and more familiar still than Altea's presence in the distance. Whatever Altea was now, however much changed, whatever it could be for her in the future--first she had to end this.

The Black Lion came alive with fresh speed and strength, rounding on Zarkon's lion as he came in for another attack. Black's jaw locked on the other lion's foreleg, gravity charging within her teeth. Zarkon blasted her with laser after laser, lighting up the cockpit and searing Allura's vision. She closed her eyes, looking out through Black's instead.

By the time Zarkon broke free, his lion was down one leg, the twisted lump of metal unrecognizable and unusable. He struggled to maneuver, his panic suffusing the bond. Allura smiled, grim and satisfied, as Shiro pressed the advantage. Zarkon tried to flee, but he was too slow, and Black caught up to him in an instant.

At the last second, Zarkon's lion flipped over, and as Black sank her teeth into its other forepaw, it sank its teeth into her neck. Zarkon shot toward Altea, pouring everything he had into his boosters, the two lions locked together, tumbling. Shiro tried to alter their trajectory, to break free, but Zarkon didn't let go and didn't let up, and soon they were caught in the planet's gravity.

Once more, Allura felt the call of home, front and center in her mind, as irresistible as the gravity itself. Black's boosters flared one last time, and Allura wasn't sure if it was at her direction or Shiro's, but either way it was too late.

They hit the ground at speed, and the world went dark.

* * *

"We're going to have to split up."

Meri glanced sidelong at Akira as he spoke. "We're already split up," she said.

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving the hulking shape of the _Emperor's Pride_  visible at the heart of the battle. Meri followed his gaze that way, then over to the _Eryth_ , Keturah's ship, where lightning split the sky and Coalition ships scrambled to retreat whenever they were forced within the druids' range.

"She's not with her druids," Akira said. Golden flecks surfaced in his eyes and vanished almost as quickly, the way the lava flows in Red's Heart bubbled up with fresh lava, then cooled, then cracked as the molten rock within flowed on. Meri didn't think Akira was in danger of losing himself, but there was no doubt Red was awake and active.

There was no doubt that both of them could sense Keturah, even at this distance.

Keith and Matt slowed as the Blue Lion surged ahead, plunging into battle and tearing through the outer ring of the _Pride_. The druids stationed here were more sparse than on the _Eryth_ , the structure itself more fragile. It posed a threat to the smaller Coalition ships, but Blue took only a single hit as she went tearing through the ring, and looped around to hit it further along the arc, sending a whole section tumbling, the druids within too disoriented to leech power from the lasers that descended upon it.

Lance and Nyma's minds caught Meri's in their wake, trying to drag her along as they broke off another long section, then dove into the main battle to shore up floundering allied lines, but Meri anchored herself here. They had a _plan._

"We're supposed to go after the druids," Matt said slowly. It wasn't quite a question, but it was far from an argument. The plan called for the four of them to break through the druids' stronger perimeter aboard the _Eryth_ and engage them on foot to take the pressure off the fleet. The druids would be deployed around the midline of the ship, two and three to a room. Between Meri's training with their magic and Matt's fire, and with the other two to run interference, they should be able to handle themselves. They could at least thin the herd before the druids decided to swarm and they were forced to retreat.

They'd made that plan under the assumption that Keturah would be with her druids, might even come to defend them. Killing Keturah wasn't expressly their goal, but they'd all expected they'd get the chance.

"We could circle back to Keturah," Meri said. "The fleet needs us to deal with those druids."

"And Keturah's taken command," Akira shot back. "If we take her out, we leave the Imperial fleet without its head."

Meri crossed her arms, swaying on her feet as Keith and Matt suddenly swerved out of the path of an oncoming barrage. "Don't tell me you're planning on confronting her yourself."

Akira hesitated, and Meri knew he'd been considering just that. After a moment, though, he shook his head. "Tempting, but no. When I fused with Red, it changed the nature of her bonds with her paladins. Keturah shouldn't have the same control over it as she didn't before--but the bond itself is still there. At close range, and without both Keith and Matt there to help me fight her, I can't guarantee that she wouldn't find a way to take control of us again."

The words seemed to pain him, but at least he was being honest. He met Meri's eyes and quirked a smile.

“Besides, I'm obviously not going to leave you to deal with the druids all alone."

"We could go." Keith and Matt had doubled down on the fight, chasing down Imperial bombers and blasting fighters that were harrying Coalition ships. They found an opening and darted aside to break off another section of the shattered ring of the _Pride_. Matt glanced over his shoulder as the fleet swarmed it like a school of piranhas, but it was Keith who went on speaking. "If the two of you think you'll be okay against the druids...?"

 _Would_  Meri be okay? She didn't want to be doing this at all, leaning into the things Keturah had taught her, going up against the druids and using their own weapons against them. But she'd already agreed to it, and going in with two fewer team members was a trade-off more than a pure loss. Of them all, Meri was best suited to fighting druids. She could kill them quickly and absorb their hits. Matt's magic was a huge boon--the only other thing the paladins had that could reliably bring a druid down--but he himself was vulnerable. Over the course of the last week, he'd discharged as much Quintessence as he could, but one direct hit from a druid could still put his crystals into overdrive, the pain incapacitating him before he could bleed it off, if the uncontrolled crystal growth didn't kill him outright.

Akira, on the other hand, was her best tank. He might not be able to bring druids down quickly, but he could fend them off. Red's Quintessence gave him a certain innate resistance to weaponized Quintessence most species didn't have, and his regenerative capabilities weren't far behind that of an Altean.

Besides, if it was just the two of them, Meri could teleport them from target to target more easily. Moving so swiftly, they could hold onto the element of surprise longer.

She met Akira's eyes, and he nodded.

"All right," Meri said, but Keith and Matt had already changed course. The sharp turn threw Meri off balance, and Akira steadied her. The battle bled away, ships and lasers blurring to a smudge of indistinguishable light and shadow at the corners of her vision as the Red Lion charged, full-tilt toward the _Pride._

Zarkon had a small handful of druids stationed here in the main structure--just as likely Keturah's companions or personal guards as permanent members of Zarkon's crew. Meri could sense them deep inside the ship, as they could no doubt sense her. Adrenaline made the senses sharper, and there was nothing in the universe quite like druidic magic.

They met in the middle, the Red Lion crashing into a hangar just as four druids appeared. They alone survived the impact of a Voltron Lion, and the momentary depressurization that followed her bursting through the door. A moment later--and a moment too late for most of those stationed in the hangar—the ship sealed the breach with a translucent blue barrier and began to re-pressurize.

Keith and Matt didn't wait for that. They were already on their feet, helmets sealed, Keith with his sword and the bayard both in hand, Matt's blue eye burning bright as he gathered his Quintessence around him like a cloak.

Akira slid into the chair Keith had vacated and, as four distinct pinpricks of Quintessence caught fire--two inside the bodies of druids, the other two burning out in a flash as the remaining druids teleported away--Meri dropped into the other chair. Akira wheeled them around. He didn't say anything, didn't linger to ensure Keith and Matt would be all right, but hovering on the edge of the bond as she was, Meri could trace his thoughts outward along their connection as it stretched across the stars.

The _Eryth_  wasn't far from the _Pride_ , but it might as well have been on the other side of a black hole. Lightning flashed occasionally across the empty space, Imperial ships darting into the bubble of openness to get a moment's reprieve or in an attempt to lure their pursuers to their doom. From the wreckage and the mangled ships drifting inside this hemisphere of death, it seemed the tactic had met with some success, at least at first. Now the Coalition fleet was far more wary, staying well outside the druids' range and leaving this corner of the battlefield essentially at a stalemate.

Akira and Red gave exactly zero fucks about the druids and their magic. By the time Meri realized that they weren't planing on a cautious approach, it was too late to do anything other than clutch the sides of her seat and swallow a scream. They came tearing through the invisible line that marked the edge of safety, sights set on the nearest hollow along the ship's midline. Too small to properly be called a hangar, the floor inlaid with crystals, and a shimmering pinkish barrier keeping the artificial atmosphere contained, each room was designed to keep two, occasionally three, druids supplied with enough power for an extended battle.

Meri had seen these rooms in passing, never from the inside, but now she saw far too many of them at far too close a range to be happy about it. Black and yellow lightning gathered inside a half a dozen hollows like spectral eyes turning toward the intruder upon their ranks.

Just two of the druids managed to unleash an attack before Akira plowed into the ship, crushing the target hollow and the druids within.

Stunned by the impact, Meri could only blink for long moments, the residue of magic sour on her tongue, thick as it slid down her throat. That, and a hand on her arm, dragged her back to steadiness, and she hauled herself upright.

It wasn't until Akira took his hand away that Meri registered the growl, low like thunder, that had slipped from his touch into her mind. The golden specks still churned through his eyes, and he checked his gun before nodding toward the back of the cockpit.

Meri stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "I know a shortcut," she said with a wink. Akira grinned, and Meri carried them away, letting the nothingness flow toward the depression formed by repeated use of druidic magic. It reshaped the world around it, that magic, and it was drawn to itself. Even before she dissolved, Meri could have mapped the location of every druid withing a quarter-rotation of this staging area, and once she'd become smoke and shadow, going to the nearest pair was as easy as falling.

The druids had a moment's warning before Meri and Akira were on them, but Meri had landed perfectly between them, a hand in either druid's chest, and she drained them dry before they could finish turning.

Akira spun a slow circle, checking the room for a third druid, and when he found none, he arched an eyebrow at Meri. "Are you _sure_  you need me here?"

She snorted, grabbed his arm, and focused on the next room. "Save the snark for _after_  they've realized what we're doing."

* * *

Lance kept one eye on the Red Lion as it charged through the battle, first to Zarkon's flagship, with its outer ring and extra turrets turning it into a flying fortress and monument to Zarkon's ego all in one, and then to Haggar's more subdued flagship beside it. The _Eryth_  was noteworthy primarily for the wide berth the other ships gave it and the lightning that ringed it like a storm--a storm that had started to abate, now that Red had crashed the party.

He wondered which of them had stayed on the _Pride,_  and which had gone to the _Eryth._  He could have asked, he supposed, could have challenged this improvisation. Maybe he _should_  have. He was certain Shiro wouldn't have let it go unremarked if he were here. Likely not Allura, either.

But Lance trusted Meri and the Reds to know what they were doing. Mostly he did.

He trusted their stubbornness not to listen to _him_ , even if he had tried to talk them out of it.

He and Nyma had their own battle to fight, in any case, and that was more than enough to worry about. Even knowing this was going to be the biggest battle of them all couldn't fully prepare Lance for what he saw. Everywhere he turned, someone else was dying. Empire or Coalition, it didn't matter. Sometimes it was hard to tell. The little fighters were lost in the dozens-- _hundreds_ \--of bombers, gunners, sentry control ships, mid-sized rebel artillery, warships and lancers and weapons Lance couldn't put a name to. You couldn't see the stars for all the lasers.

You could hardly see the black.

This wasn't the sort of battle one Lion could change the tide of. Lance had a hard time believing that Voltron itself would have made that much of a difference. There was too much happening for Voltron to have taken every enemy on at once, and if they’d have tried, they would have done just as much damage to their allies.

It would have been nice to have one or two other lions to back him up, though. He wouldn't deny that. Nyma was sniping everything she could see that looked like a threat, and Lance took them anywhere he spotted an ally in trouble.

If their careful formations and purposefully vague battle plans had held up this long, Lance couldn't tell from the middle of the action. There were no lines here, only chaos. It was chaos like Lance had never seen before, the fleet breaking down into smaller and smaller groups more focused on survival than striking at the heart of the Empire's power.

Then again, Lance had no room to judge. He was so busy flitting from one crisis to another that he lost sight of the big picture.

One minute he was pushing back the Imperial line that had closed in around the homeworld fleet--bloodthirsty vultures eager to claim the honor of bringing down people they no doubt saw as traitors.

There was an explosion of noise on the general comms, which Lance had left on mainly as a way to identify who needed his help. The Coalition had tenuous authority over Voltron at best, and the battle was much too fast-paced for Central Command to keep on top of Blue's position and react in time to hand down new orders every time Lance and Nyma cleared out a skirmish.

They were mostly left to their own devices, and Lance was mostly content to ignore Command.

Until the burst of noise, so shrill with terror it brought Lance and Nyma both up short.

Sudden silence descended on the line.

Someone let out a sob, quickly smothered.

Lance wheeled around just in time to catch the dying embers of a fireball that left a vaguely disk-shaped husk behind, cracked in two and drifting, dead.

It took a few minutes for the truth to penetrate. Lance scanned the battlefield for signs of Command's ship, a midsize vessel with heavy shields and few weapons normally positioned at the back of the fleet. Today, with attacks coming from all sides, it should have been dead-center.

Lance's stomach churned as he realized what must have happened. Command was inexperienced and sometimes overwhelmed, but Lance could never fault their dedication or their courage. They monitored every battle in person, unwilling to risk communications being intercepted or disrupted. It was a risk, but one that had consistently paid off. Their shields could hold out long enough for the fleet, or sometimes the Lions themselves, to turn on their attacker.

After two and a half months of near-constant battles, Haggar could hardly have missed the ship that always hung back without attacking. She may not have cracked the comms, not with their short range and heavy encryption, but she would have seen that virtually all of the fleet's chatter revolved around that ship.

At that point, it was only a matter of creating an opportunity.

Lance hadn't seen the attack; he didn't know if Haggar had had every free ship in her fleet turn its fire on Command's ship, or if they'd overlooked some threat among her gunners and specialty ships, but the end result was the same.

The shields fell.

Command was no more.

And suddenly the Coalition found itself fighting without a plan.

* * *

The lab was sparsely staffed--that much, at least, was a good thing.

Pidge led the charge with very little idea where they were going and even less regard for the staff. Guard, med tech, druid, or janitor, it made no difference. These were the people who had held their father prisoner for nearly two years, experimenting on him, taking control, forcing him to fight his family, to kill innocent people.

Pidge didn't count how many they killed. It wasn't about numbers, wasn't even about vengeance, really. Somewhere in this lab was the control system for the master key devices. Once Pidge found it, and figured out how it worked, and permanently disabled it, there would be nothing left to stop them taking their family home.

 _That_  was what mattered.

Karen kept pace with Pidge, occasionally even getting off a shot with her pistol before Pidge had time to deal with the latest resistance. She was every bit as ruthless on the battlefield as in the courtroom, and she had good aim to back it up. Val, who was watching their backs, rarely had a chance to do a thing in these fights.

Pidge stopped at an intersection, trying to remind themself to breathe. They'd made a few trips to this lab with Val before, venturing out into the halls whenever their dad wasn't in the astral realm to talk to and they could drag themself away from watching him, just to know he was alive.

Those excursions had been rare, and covered only a handful of rooms closest to the cells. Sam's account to Shiro and Val's own explorations provided a little more information, but none of them had ever seen the controls--not and known what they were.

That meant it was mostly blind wandering, interspersed with bursts of violence as Pidge tried to fend off a panic attack. They'd blasted their way into one of the hangars at the opposite end of the arc from the one where Dark Yellow had crashed. That meant two things. First, that they'd entered into a section of the base neither they nor Val nor Sam had ever had a chance to explore--more likely the location of the master key controls, but also not somewhere they could navigate instinctively.

Two, Rax was somewhere close, and almost certainly hunting them. Pidge wasn't sure how complex the mind control was, how much it allowed for independent thought, but they doubted very much that the lions going down would stop any of Zarkon's paladins.

It hadn't before.

The other three lions had landed outside the lab. The pilots would have to cover a bit of ground to reach the lab and begin the hunt--but Pidge estimated they'd bought themself minutes at best.

"I want to know who built this place so I can punch them in the balls," Pidge muttered. "Everything looks the same!"

"It was probably designed that way," Val said unhelpfully. "They knew we were gonna find them sooner or later and try a jailbreak."

Pidge wrinkled their nose and finally chose the hallway on the right, mainly because the one to the left had a light that flickered and they'd been going straight so long it was starting to drive Pidge nuts. "Still want to punch them in the balls."

Val was silent for a few moments as they hurried down this new corridor, and then she said, "What do you suppose these controls are going to look like?"

Pidge lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Big, probably. First-of-its-kind machines usually are. Have to make it work before you can make it efficient."

"We talking like whole-room big?"

"Most likely. Even if it's not the whole room on its own, it would probably have its own space. The early prototype Haggar put in Shiro's arm was Quintessence based, so I imagine this one is, too. It's definitely not anything I ever figured out how to hack. There's probably a crystal array, or maybe synthetic-Q powering it all."

"Anything else?"

Pidge finally looked over at her, frowning. "That's about as much as I can guess without seeing it. Why?"

Rather than answer, Val closed her eyes. A moment later, a second copy of her appeared behind them at the last intersection. This copy stared at herself for a moment, shuddering, then ducked out of sight.

The first Val opened her eyes and smiled tightly. "That should speed this up a little bit, right?"

"Are you going to be okay?" Karen asked. "That other version of you isn't going to have any backup out there."

Val waved a hand, tapping her bayard against her thigh. "If I run into too much trouble, I'll just snap back and try again. Easy-peasy."

She didn't sound terribly confident about that, and Pidge couldn't blame her. They hadn't had time to study her bilocation as much as they would have liked, but they'd figured out a few things--including the fact that injuries done to either body tended to stick around when they collapsed back into one. Sometimes the pain didn't even wait that long.

That wasn't an expendable copy running around out there; it was _Val_ , and all it would take was one lucky shot to bring both versions of her down.

Val set her jaw and stared Pidge down, as though daring them to argue with her. They didn't, as Val probably knew they wouldn't. The stakes were too high, their window of opportunity too narrow. They needed every advantage here.

There were only so many places the controller could be. One rim of the lab, near the hangars--a few dozen rooms, maybe. With Val's double going one way and the rest of them the other, they should be able to cover it in short order.

Pidge swore they could feel the pilots marching closer with every pounding footstep.

They opened doors as they passed them, hardly sparing a glance for the ones that opened without a fight. The controller was too important; it would be guarded, behind a locked door, or both. Maybe.

Most of them were storerooms, at any rate. Pidge rushed along, cutting open a door here and there only to find more storerooms, an archive, a comms deck.

Val's next breath came sharp and short. She stumbled, and both Pidge and Karen turned toward her. The bond wasn't strong enough outside Green for Pidge to feel the wound, but they felt an echo of surprise, fear, and then a twisting in their gut as Val snapped back into one.

The wound didn't appear so much as slip into reality. Pidge blinked, and suddenly Val's left gauntlet was gone, one long shard of red-stained blue embedded in her arm, and Pidge was left with the distinct impression that it had always been like that, and they'd just overlooked it until now. The blood smeared across Val's breastplate--not a lot, but enough to make Pidge's heart pound--looked to already be drying.

Val hissed as she pulled the armor fragment from her arm, discarding it in favor of clamping down on the wound. "I'm fine," she said, grimacing at Karen, who was frowning in a way that told Pidge Val _wasn't_  fine and Karen didn't appreciate the bravado. "I dunno if I got away before he broke my wrist or if it just didn't carry over, but either way--" She held up her bloodied hand and rolled it in a circle, wincing only a little.

"He?" Pidge asked.

Val tucked her arm against her stomach and pursed her lips. "The good news is, I found the control room. I'm pretty sure."

"You did," Karen said, a little twitch of the brow belying the adjunct bond at work.

Val nodded. "The bad news? Rax got there first."

* * *

"Nyma--"

Lance stopped there, letting the name hang in the air, the battle frozen around them and the afterimage of the exploding command ship dancing across his vision. He wasn't sure what he was like in the bond right now, whether Nyma felt his racing thoughts or the profound stillness of shock, or both, or whether she was too busy fielding her own emotions.

The roaring in his ears was too loud for him to pay attention to anything happening outside his own skin.

"What are you waiting for?" Nyma demanded. " _Move._ "

He didn't know if she was giving him permission, or just telling him to get going before he got them both shot, but he moved just the same, Nyma giving him a little mental shove that had him leaning on the throttle, the latest skirmish forgotten behind him.

Coran was on the main line, shouting down the panicked voices of a hundred worlds who'd just watched their best shot at victory go up in flames. It was chaos, half the people on the line trying to take command, half spewing panic and bitterness. Two dozen ships turned to flee. None made it past the ring of Imperial warships intact.

 _And what the hell difference do you think_ you  _can make?_  Lance thought, Blue's momentum flagging again as his doubts swirled around him. Someone needed to take control of the situation, clearly. Someone experienced. Someone the Coalition knew and trusted to have _all_  their best interests at heart, and not to throw lives away to protect his own.

Coran wasn't having much luck, and he was just about as even-handed as they came.

But a paladin's title carried a lot of weight.

"Nyma," Lance said, still breathless, his head floating an inch off his shoulders as the unreality of this whole situation threatened to make him puke. "I really hate to ask this, but--"

"Did you not hear me before?" She gave him another mental shove, shooting down a bomber that had ventured too close for comfort. "I said _move_. Go!"

He realized with some chagrin that she'd figured out his plan even before he had, and he spun them around toward the castle-ship, crossing the battlefield in less than five seconds. He didn't bother trying to break into the madness on the comms just yet; too many people were talking, not a single one of them listening. Why waste the breath?

They skidded across Blue's hangar floor, Lance shooting to his feet before stalling out, turning as Nyma bounded across the cockpit.

"Are you _sure_  you're going to be okay by yourself?"

She hip-checked him out of the way and claimed the pilot's seat, turning Blue back toward the hangar doors before she spared a disdainful scowl for Lance. "You're still here? Vrekking hell, Lance. Get your ass in gear!"

It was as close to reassurance as he was going to get, but there was no mistaking the fondness in the bond, and he flashed a smile that only deepened her scowl.

" _Lance!_ "

"I'm going, I'm going." He opened a private line as he shot down the ramp and out into the hangar, the roar of Blue's engines drowning out his voice. "Don't die without me!"

"Don't screw us all!" she shot back.

God, he hoped not. But standing around wasn't helping anyone. He charged for the elevator and waited out the interminable ten-second ride to the bridge, where one of Coran's lieutenants directed him to the holomap chamber across the hall, where one entire wall had been swapped out for a massive comms panel. A series of screens showing analytics on allied and enemy ships punctuated a star map that had been zoomed in tight on this battle.

Coran looked up from one such screen, the lines around his eyes easing as he caught sight of Lance.

"Hey," Lance puffed as he crossed the room to join Coran in the center. Coran had pulled only four of his crew members to help him here, two manning the comms, another on scanners, and one flitting around the center with Coran translating all that data into markers on the map. "How's it looking?"

Coran's grimace wasn't promising, but he stepped back from his screen and gestured Lance forward. "See for yourself."

It felt like a challenge, though there was no malice behind it. It was the opening salvo of a game of _eshet_ , both of them finding their footing and feeling out the enemy's strategy.

Lance had never played a two-on-two version of _eshet_ , but that was sort of what this felt like. Coran wasn't his opponent here, but he was sizing Lance up. For a moment, Lance quailed under the scrutiny. He wondered, again, why he'd thought he had any place in this room. The only people he'd ever led into battle were the paladins, and them only when Shiro and Allura were out of the picture.

He let the doubts run wild for only a moment, then shoved them aside, straightened his spine, and studied the screen before him. It gave him an overview of the battlefield's current standing--the number of ships of each class on both sides, an estimate of the remaining druids--still eighty percent, but the Reds and Meri hadn't had much time to do their work--Nyma's current position and target. Touching each entry on the list brought up more details, as did touching the holographic icons flitting around him like swallows descending on a flock of mosquitoes.

There was too much information here to take it all in, but Lance got a glimpse of it, between the summary notes and the hologram itself. The Coalition was surrounded, and the lack of command had sent them into a panic. He heard it on the background buzz of the comms and saw it in the desperate, flitting motion of the hologram ships. They were scattered, fragmented, and letting themselves be maneuvered into traps by an equally disjointed but at least level-headed enemy.

He'd played games of _eshet_  with worse odds--games where he was more outnumbered, outgunned, with strong shields but minimal offensive power--or the opposite, lots of potential for suicide runs and a fleet full of ships that couldn't take a single hit. The castle and Anamuri's _Hope of Kera_  were both in solid shape still. Could he use that?

Only if they were all on the same page.

"Everyone shut up," Lance said, his voice cold and sharp and cutting. It was the voice he'd used when Luz and Mateo were younger and prone to screaming matches. More controlled than a shout, but no less intimidating. The noise on the comms didn't cut out entirely, but a number of voices faltered. There were three types on the comms, he figured. Three things he had to manage, and manage quickly, if he wanted to get this battle back on track.

First were the seasoned soldiers, the rebels from Chettok and the ones from Kera, Kolivan's troops and Layeni's Guard. When Command fell, they'd have kept their head, and if they went on the comms, it was only in an attempt to rally their allies. The first sign of competent central leadership, and they'd all fall in line.

Second were the would-be leaders. Some had good intentions, some were overly ambitious, and there was no way to tell whether any of them had the skill to backup their bid for power. Lance could hear a few of these still on the comms, not just calling for order but trying to dole out commands while the fleet was still far too jumbled to see any plan to fruition. Some of them might put up a fight, but he hoped they'd be cowed by the title of paladin and back off once it was obvious that Lance had the backing of most of the fleet.

The third group was the real problem: the people who were panicking, flat-out. The mixed flights made up of the remnants of private fleets, personal guards, and new recruits to the Coalition's cause, mercenaries and smugglers who'd rather deal incremental damage in fleeting strikes than stand against odds like these, even perhaps some of the better organized but inexperienced troops, like Mirek's homeworld forces.

These people were scared. Nothing more, and nothing less, and Lance's job was to convince them that they weren't dead yet.

The buzz on the comms was still too much--too much fear, too many competing voices, all of it a recipe for miscommunication. Lance curled his hands into fists, let his frustration build up in his chest, let it condense into the kind of unyielding authority he’d never really mastered.

"I said _shut up!_ " he barked. "This is a military line, not a nightclub. If you've got relevant information to pass along, go ahead, but the rest of you get a handle on your panic and get out of the way of the rest of us who are trying to win this war."

His initial outburst had startled a good many people into silence, and in plowing over the rest of the chatter, he'd bullied down the would-be commanders still trying to make progress by spitting into a windstorm. By the end, he was left with stunned silence on the comms and the startled stares of Coran's four crew members.

Lance's skin crawled with the imagined attention of several _hundred thousand_  people. _God_. He felt like he'd just been doused in ice water. He was going to make an idiot out of himself. Worse, if he screwed this up, he could very easily get them all killed.

"And who the _vrekt_  are you?" someone demanded.

Coran put a hand on Lance's shoulder, smiled, and nodded, and Lance's chest swelled with pride.

"My name is Lance Mendoza. I'm a paladin of the Blue Lion, and I'm taking charge of this operation."

* * *

The _Emperor's Pride_  was in chaos--far more than Keith could have conceived of. The Empire as a whole was not prone to panic; those who cracked under the pressure were branded cowards and would be lucky to get off with a reprimand and reassignment. Zarkon had no use for the weak, after all.

Had things changed so much in the last two years, Keith wondered? Or had the upper crust held themselves to different standards? It seemed unlikely--aside from Keith's father and the other remaining legacy Prince, every one of Zarkon's Princes had earned their position, and they'd done so in battle.

But had their crews done the same?

That Keith didn't know, but it turned his stomach, a strange blend of shame and superiority churning as he and Matt charged ever deeper into Zarkon's flagship. These weren't his people, not now and not ever, in any real sense. He shouldn't care if they were scrambling around like they'd never seen battle before. It made his job easier.

And it made him wonder how he'd ever feared the Empire enough to play along for almost eighteen years.

It wasn't that they met _no_  resistance as they careened through the halls; the depressurization in the hangar where Akira had dropped them had drawn down the guard force in droves.

Small droves.

They fought a dozen two corners away from the hangar, and had run into four smaller squads since, all of them easily dispatched, most seemingly surprised to find two paladins several layers deep into this fortress of a flagship. It _could_  have been a fortress, if they'd known how to run it. The sheer size of the structure was intimidating, and the twisting hallways and frequent security checkpoints should have deterred any attempt at infiltration.

But the checkpoints were unmanned, half the security force seemed to have been sent out into battle, and most of the people they encountered carried datapads or shouted into comms and looked more ready to wet themselves at the sight of the paladins than to attack the enemy.

 _Victory or death_ didn't apply to everyone, it seemed.

Neither Keith nor Matt had access to floor plans for the _Pride_ , and they didn't have Pidge here to hack it out of the ship's own computers. The best their armor could do was provide their location relative to the ship's hull--approaching the midline from their entry point several hundred feet down and almost halfway to the ship's core, where Keith suspected the throne room would be. A few Princes and many of the lower ranked commanders followed the traditional arrangement, where commands were given from a room with a clear view of the battlefield. Digital viewscreens could be hacked, lose power, or even introduce a delay of up to a few seconds if they weren't top of the line.

For Zarkon and most of his Princes, however, tech was no issue, so they opted for a central, secure location.

(That was its own brand of cowardice, but somehow Keith had always bought the line that it was a simple tactical calculation and left it at that.)

The ship's crew stepped it up a notch as they tore through a security line that looked to be more robust than the previous few, with a long stretch of unbroken steel before they finally found a checkpoint. This one was actually manned--mostly by sentries, which fell to Keith's blade in a quick-tempo dance of screeching metal and lasers that came too slow to make a difference. Matt shot the three living security agents in the same window, and they charged onward.

A veritable wall of soldiers was waiting for them around the next corner--dozens of sentries and an equal number of Galra--all in uniform but _not_  all in armor, curiously. They must have had to pull from the ranks of comms techs and mechanics to make a suitably formidable force. No wonder it had taken them this long to put up so much of a fight.

Keith adjusted his grip on his blade, scanning the line for a point of weakness. It would be risky to try to fight them all--they could probably do it, but it would leave them in no condition to take on Haggar herself. That might even be her plan; she had to know that an understaffed, largely undefended ship wouldn't stop the paladins for long. But if she could stall for a little while, just keep them from swarming her when they were fresh...

The soldier at the head of the group suddenly held up his hand, and the line parted, opening up a gap wide enough for Keith and Matt to pass through.

"What's her game?" Matt hissed, his pistol never wavering, his eyes darting from face to face.

Keith noted that he didn't hesitate to say that Haggar was behind this. He was right, too--not probably, not maybe; he _was_. Haggar had been a dull presence in the back of their minds ever since Red and Akira had pinpointed her on the _Pride._  That as much as Keith's familiarity with Imperial cowardice and this new display of intimidation told him they were going the right direction.

"I guess she wants to deal with us herself," Keith said. He, too, hesitated. That gap stank of a trap, but what Keith didn't know was it if would be sprung here or only once they found Haggar.

Matt's brow furrowed. "She was going to deal with us either way. I'd have expected her to want to wear us down first."

"Maybe she's afraid we aren't here for her. The power core would be near the throne room, but if we were here for sabotage, we might be able to get in and out without crossing paths with her."

"Or maybe these troops are smart enough to know they can't take us in a straight fight. Figure if they surround us, catch us by surprise, they stand a better chance."

Keith couldn't totally discount that possibility, but it didn't feel very Imperial. If they wanted to show their numbers, why not attack while intimidation had the paladins flat-footed? On the other hand, if they were going for an ambush, why advertise it?

With a glance at Matt to make sure they were on the same page--they were, of course; hesitation never won anything--Keith started walking. He didn't put his sword away, as Matt didn't deactivate the bayard, as none of the soldiers around them holstered their weapons. Neither side trusted the other, and the first wrong move from either side would turn this into a bloodbath.

Matt's free hand, curled into a fist, didn't look any different from usual. Not to the naked eye, and neither Keith nor likely anyone else here was sensitive enough to Quintessence to tell if Matt was readying a more devastating attack, as he almost certainly was.

No one struck as they passed through the line, which closed behind them. A line of soldiers, clerks, and sentries split off to either side, keeping pace and blocking off doors and corridors--keeping them on track for the all-too-familiar presence growing ever closer.

Haggar was waiting for them in the throne room, which had been emptied of all other personnel. The screens were dark, the comms silenced. Keith and Matt's escort stopped at the door, building up as though to deter a bid for escape--as though such a thing were on the table in the first place.

The door closed behind them.

The lights extinguished.

In the darkness, Keith clung to the bond as his only anchor. With Haggar so close, and Red and Akira so closely attuned to him and to Matt, the bond resonated like the peal of a bell. Matt's heart began to hammer. Haggar's presence slid beneath Keith's skin, a slimy, invasive feeling that reminded him of how he'd felt in the hours after Haggar's visit to the castle, when she'd twisted the bond to take control of Keith and Matt. It had been months, and Keith, Matt, and Akira had deliberately tested the limits of their bond this last week in preparation to face Haggar, but it still left him feeling vulnerable and exposed.

The lights came back on, blinding in their intensity, and Keith squinted against them. Gone was the steel floor, a raised dais in the center and a narrow catwalk leading to it, comms stations, scanners, and other equipment arrayed below the throne in an empty, shadowed pit. Gone was the matte gray of deactivated digital viewscreens, which should have shown the battle raging outside.

Instead, Keith found himself in a different sort of pit, sands shifting beneath his feet as he backed away from a roaring crowd. Classmates, teachers, family--and of course the enforcers with their rifles, hidden away in the shadowed upper reaches of the Arena where only the red pinprick of their laser sights gave them away.

 _It's just an illusion,_  he told himself as his heart began to pound. Matt's mind reached out for him, but his own panic rode close to the surface, tangible even with so much distance between them.

(Hardly any distance. They'd been close enough to touch when the illusion closed around them, and they were close enough now.)

It was Ingav all over again, an illusion too powerful to break alone, but which couldn't overwrite the bond. He could even sense Haggar there, her poison painted into every line of this scene, seeping into the shadows, echoing in the call of the crowd. She couldn't hide herself from him; she couldn't conceal the nature of her illusions. That was a weakness he could exploit. Knowing the illusion for what it was was half the battle, after all. She could only do so much to a mind she couldn't control entirely.

She could do plenty to his body while his mind was trapped in here.

He just had to get out, then. Keith readied himself on the sand, steeling himself to face his Proof all over again--but this time the way out wasn't to kill his opponent. He had to hold onto Matt, to reach out to Akira. The three of them together could reach the Heart, even at a distance. Do that, and they could slip free of this illusion, and do it again and again, as many times as it took to take Haggar down for good.

The sand crunched as his opponent stepped onto the sands, and Keith took a deep breath. He hated to play along with this illusion, but he needed to be able to focus. Just because the wounds he might receive in this illusion weren't real didn't mean they wouldn't hurt--and pain was a bigger threat to his focus than unpleasant memories or a fight against an untrained, unarmed prisoner.

He turned, and it became suddenly very difficult to think of the bond, of Red and Akira, of reaching the Heart and freedom from a resurrected memory. It wasn't the nameless prisoner he'd killed in his Proof who faced him on the sand, a cybernetic arm glowing white-violet.

It was Shiro.

* * *

Six chambers deep into the offensive ring of the _Eryth_  and Meri was already starting to lose herself. 

With the fight at Ingav so fresh in her mind, she could hardly claim to be surprised, but the simple fact was she wasn't now, and never had been, practiced enough at druidic magic to resist the momentum of it. Once she got going, and the magic began to stir, it was difficult to pull back.

She teleported herself and Akira into the center of the next knot of Quintessence, the seventh room of identical design, with three druids who by now had to know what was happening. They didn't leave their post, though. It might have been Haggar's orders, or it might have just been that they were all as caught up in the magic as Meri. As long as they stayed where they were, they could unleash limitless destruction on the Coalition forces.

If they left, they would have no outlet for their hunger.

Meri hardly cared either way. She landed in the middle of the three druids, let go of Akira's arm, and sprang at the target in front of her. Still streaming black smoke, she fell on him, draining his Quintessence and sharpening it into a bolt of lightning even as his desiccated corpse fell to the ground.

She spun, unleashed at a second druid.

Akira had finished the other off by now--a knife in his ribs to distract him and a laser through the head to kill him. It was quick, efficient.

The magic raged at being deprived of a target, and Meri seized Akira's wrist to carry him to the next room before she did something she'd regret.

Akira shifted at the last second, and something dark and paranoid inside Meri recoiled from an expected attack--but he only pulled his arm back far enough that when Meri grabbed him, she found his hand instead of his wrist.

He interlaced his fingers with hers and squeezed once.

Meri paused before she teleported, meeting Akira's eyes. The golden glow burned bright by now, but not quite bright enough to cover up the gray. He said nothing, but he held her gaze, nodded once, and the magic backed down just enough for Meri to feel a faint twinge of shame.

She broke eye contact first, turning her mind and her magic toward the next target. Even from here she could tell this one would be different. The Quintessence blazed bright, like a bonfire stoked against the night. The magic within her strained toward the feast. Her rational mind shank back.

"Be ready for trouble," she warned Akira, and then she took them in.

There were more druids here than the last seven rooms; that much was plain even before her vision cleared. The room was the same size, but it stank of ozone and sweat, the latent magic crackling across Meri's skin as her feet touched the ground.

Two of the ten druids gathered in this room turned at once toward the intruders, unleashing sprays of lightning that washed the room in light. Meri still had a hold of Akira's hand and teleported them to the relative safety directly between the two druids who'd apparently been charged with taking out the druid-killers.

Unfortunately for them, Akira had more or less adapted to the constant disorientation of traveling via druid magic--or else Red was wide awake enough for her instincts to be driving them both--and his dagger was in the first druid's side almost before it was solid enough to cut. The lightning died out, casting that half of the room into shadow as Meri turned toward their other assailant, grabbing her outstretched hand and letting the raw Quintessence flow through her body and back out into the hand she had pressed to the druid's heart.

The next two druids turned as one, further proof that this was a concerted strategy the druids had concocted and not a simple battening down the hatches. They'd left the first string of rooms as bait to slow Meri and Akira down and condensed the remainder into more easily defensible strongholds, combining four or five stations into one. If Meri had her math right--and questing outward with her senses for other pockets of druidic magic told her she was--there were only two other strongholds like this one.

Meri killed the second druid as easily as the first, and didn't wait for Akira to deal with his. The druids might go on attacking in pairs, but she thought it more likely they would try to swarm them now that it was clear what they were up against. She teleported away preemptively as her opponent fell, depositing herself at the end of the line and beginning to tear through them, absorbing attacks, enduring them when they turned to the black lightning that drained Quintessence, and cut them down, one by one by one.

She hardly noticed when Akira went rigid in the middle of fighting the last two druids from the opposite end of the line, but she couldn’t miss his shout of pain as one of their attacks finally landed, enveloping him in golden light.

His eyes snapped open, blazing with that same gold, and a growl tore from his throat as he leaped at his attacker, knocking her to the ground. He smashed his helmet into her mask, shattering it, and drove his knife into her heart.

He moved on without waiting to see if she was dead, moving with the lithe, predatory grace she'd seen only once before, in the aftermath of Keena's attempted abduction of Keith, when Akira had been almost more Red than himself, blinded by a protective rage and deaf to all reason.

Worry for what that might mean overshadowed the siren song of druidic magic, and Meri tore through the remaining druids with cold efficiency. She didn't savor their deaths, didn't tease out screams or try to make them suffer.

She cut them down, and Akira did the same from the other end, and when they met in the middle, it wasn't Meri who had to stop herself from attacking a friend as the last remaining target.

Meri stood unflinching as Akira stopped his knife inches from her chest, chasing his gaze until the golden glow faded enough for Akira to stumble back, his hands shaking as he retrieved the gun he'd lost in the flurry of battle.

"Keith and Matt need me," he said without preamble, lifting his head to meet Meri's eyes.

Her heart gave a pang as her fears redoubled. That first druid hadn't landed a lucky hit; as Meri had expected, something had distracted Akira. What that was--whether one of his paladins was hurt, and how badly, or if they were only in danger of _being_  hurt--there was no way to be sure.

But the fear in his eyes, the rumbling roar that echoed on the edge of hearing, said that they didn't have much time.

"Go," Meri said.

Akira took a step toward the shimmering barrier between this alcove and open space, then stopped himself. "You--"

"I'll be fine. We've cleared out more than half the druids already. I can handle the rest."

He didn't insult her by asking if she was sure, just nodded, surged forward to hug her, and then stepped back. "I'll tell Lance and Nyma to be ready to come pick you up."

"Good luck," they said at the same moment. Akira flashed a grin, then took a running leap through the barrier into open space, where the Red Lion caught him in her jaw and swooped out of sight, leaving Meri, and twenty druids, alone in the outer ring of the _Eryth._

* * *

Shay thought she knew terror. She had faced the Vkullor a few times now. She had walked the halls of Metos after an attack. She had heard the pain and the fear of her people echoing in her very soul as she struggled to reassure them that they were safe now--that they _could_  be after an attack like that.

She was unsure if time had dulled her memory of the fear, or if being alone now only made it that much worse.

Olkarion was hardly a glimmer in the distance, dimmer and smaller than the stars around it. She could make out few details, had not even been able to when she first arrived and flashed her cloak to get the Vkullor’s attention.

She had only known it took the bait when she remembered to check the paired trackers, and the speed with which it moved lit a fire beneath her seat. She had already diverted power from the shields and the weapons to the engines, leaving only enough charge for a wormhole or two in case things on Klenahn took too long.

For the first minutes, silence had been her only company, the stars cruising past and Olkarion fading behind her and the threat of the Vkullor yet out of sight. Yellow sang anguish to match the tears streaming down Shay's cheeks, and it was a long while before she worked up the courage to hail the Olkari defense force.

"This is Paladin Shay of the Yellow Lion," she said, pouring her terror and grief into the song to keep her voice steady. Even so, she paused, emotion closing her throat for long seconds before she managed, in a small voice, "How bad is it?"

There was chatter in the background before the operator found their voice--chatter that told her all was not lost, and that she had arrived in time to save many, if not all. "Paladin-- The Vkullor-- Is it gone?"

"I am leading it away. Do not fret." She did not promise them what she could not guarantee--that it would be all right, that the danger was now past. "I need to know how bad the damage is."

"I-I think it only got off one attack." The man's voice shook terribly, and Shay's heart went out to him. The aftereffects of a Vkullor attack were difficult enough to witness; she could not imagine sitting at a computer, watching the monster approach and unable to do anything about it. "It missed the continent, thank the gods. We're not sure the damage, or whether anyone was on the islands in the vicinity, but the impact caused a tsunami larger than anything we've prepared for. We're evacuating the coast, but we don't have much time. A few hours, at best."

"I... I will see if I can send aid," Shay said. It was an empty promise, she knew. What ships the Coalition had at their disposal were already engaged with the Imperial fleet. She could request aid from the defense forces of member worlds--and she began to do just that, drafting a message in her head as Yellow connected to the castle for contact frequencies.

She doubted anyone would answer.

It was something to do, though. Something besides flying away and watching her scanners for the Vkullor, something besides hoping the tsunami's death toll was not too high and waiting for Hunk to contact her with good news.

She hoped it was good news.

It had been some time since she had dropped him at Klenahn--fifteen minutes? Twenty? She had not stopped to note the passage of time in that first rush. All she knew was that an ache had crept into her neck from hunching over Yellow's controls, an itch taking root beneath her skin from the imagined attention of the Vkullor not yet visible behind her.

No--she saw it now, a void on the scanners, a flicker of red among the stars.

A scream stuck in her throat, fear coiling in her gut and turning her limbs to lead. It was upon her, close enough now that she had mere moments before she would have to open a wormhole to spare herself becoming the Vkullor's next victim.

She felt a distortion in space, invisible, indefinable, pass her by. It left no mark, showed up on none of the scans except as a blip on one she rarely used that measured local gravity. She caught the change from the corner of her eye only, gone long before she turned toward that screen, but the readings were enough to make her Quintessence run cold. That spike would have crushed her without Yellow's hull, and that had been an attack that _missed_.

She twisted hard to one side, taking off at an angle in case the Vkullor decided to try again. Its mouth was wide open, a spark of greenish-gold building in its gullet.

Shay had never seen a Vkullor in the act of attacking before.

She did not want to see it now.

She set the coordinates for a wormhole with a thought and plunged in before the Vkullor struck--and even so she swore she saw the wormhole warping behind her as she emerged on the other end.

Heart hammering, she checked to be sure her cloak was still in place, then opened a call to Hunk's frequency.

"Shay!" he cried, cursing as a metallic thump rang over the line. "Are you okay?"

She had to laugh at that. "I would not call this 'okay,' but I am alive. I drew the Vkullor away from Olkarion, but I just had to wormhole ahead of it to stay out of its range. Where are you?"

"In the cavern." Hunk's voice thrummed with the song, anxious and sorry and scared for her and for Olkarion. Even at such a great distance, she felt his song quiver in her chest, conveying so much more than his words alone. "I'm _so_ sorry, Shay. We've almost got it up and running. Can you hold out a few more minutes?"

"Yes. But only a few."

"Only a few,” he assured her. “We're putting the last few touches on it now."

There was more he wasn't saying, and Shay glanced at the little dancing line that marked the call's audio. "What?" she asked.

"Even once this is up... There's no targeting system, Shay. I can fire it, but I can't aim."

Shay cringed, but nodded. "Okay."

"It's _not_  okay, though." She felt the frantic motion of his hands in his voice, wild gesticulation that brought a smile to her face despite the situation. "We only get a couple of shots with this thing. If I miss, it's over."

"And if you hit, the universe will be rid of a terrible threat."

Hunk fell quiet, his song yielding the stage to hers. "You say it like it's so simple."

"It is. I trust you, Hunk."

"I could hit you. I can't aim to make sure I don't."

"You won't."

"Shay..."

She sat up, leaning again on the controls to make up for the speed she had lost while speaking with Hunk. "Finish your work," she said. "And then take the shot."

* * *

Zuza had joined Rax in the control room by the time Val led the others there. Seeing them there together was an odd mix of despair and relief--relief because that was one more person they wouldn't have to go looking for once Pidge disabled to master key devices.

Despair, because every additional pilot who made it here was another notch harder Val would have to fight to fend them off. If Sam or Rolo joined them before Pidge was done, Val worried she wouldn't be able to avoid hurting someone.

"I'll take Rax?" Val muttered to Karen, squaring off with them in the hallway outside the control room. The door stood open behind them, showing a dark, cavernous room lit primarily by the cold blue light of crystals.

Karen sized up Zuza--she wasn't exactly unimposing, having a pretty average build for a Galra--but Karen had mainly trained against other Galra, and Val doubted Zuza had Rax's raw strength. They'd all seen Shay fight, and the Alteans were just about the only ones who could rival her for brute force.

At length, Karen nodded, and gestured behind her back to Pidge. Their restlessness rode high in the bond, but they knew the plan. Their job was to disable those master keys, no matter what. It would kill them not to fight alongside Val and Karen, especially if the battle turned as ugly as Val thought it would, but they knew as well as anyone that theirs was by far the more vital task.

They needed no signal to know when to move. Val broke left, Karen right, and Pidge hung back long enough for the others to draw Rax and Zuza's attention. Val saw them dart through the melee a moment later, but didn't track their progress to the computer at the back of the room. They would do what they could, and meanwhile Val needed to keep her eyes on Rax.

He'd caught her by surprise before, but that brief encounter had taught her to be cautious. He wasn't as strong as Shay, not after being left to rot in a cell for the better part of two years, but neither was he holding back. He could, and would, crush her skull if she gave him an opening.

So she didn't give him an opening.

The master keys' programming was impressive, complex enough to get the pilots to this room and command them to defend it without anyone here to actually issue commands, but it had its limits. Rax and Zuza saw three enemies in the room, and seemed to weigh them all equally as threats. They tried to break away to go after Pidge occasionally, but as long as Val and Karen kept them busy, they were content with the fight right in front of them.

And it was easy enough to keep them busy.  Val and Karen had both brought pistols with a training setting--low power blasts that would sting, even through armor, but not do any real damage. A few hits when his attention started to wander and Rax would zero right back in on Val.

The rest of the time, things were a little more tricky. Neither Rax nor Zuza had been given a weapon. Curious, since Sam had definitely had a replica bayard the day he killed Ryner. Had it been too difficult to make more, even close to a year later? But then, why not given them standard pistols? Did Haggar not trust them to remain under her control?

No.

They'd caught her by surprise. Val puzzled it out while she danced around Rax, staying always just outside his reach--close enough to taunt, but not close enough to get hit, not again. She was faster than him, and more agile, but when he lunged he crossed half the room in the blink of an eye, or so it seemed. The paladins had caught Haggar by surprise with this attack. They'd been scrambling to get Zarkon's lions in the sky. Rax and Zuza wouldn't have weapons while they were in the cells, obviously--so why waste the time to arm them when the plan was to stop the paladins in the air?

Rax backed her against the wall with his next lunge, latching onto her shoulders and slamming her against the metal panels hard enough to leave a dent. Val grunted, but when Rax pulled back to renew his leverage and slam her again, she brought her legs up between them, planting her feet against his chest and shoving.

It almost wasn't enough to break his hold, but once there was a little space between them, Val dropped to the ground, where she rolled aside, coming to her feet near Karen's position in the center of the room.

"Having fun yet?" Val asked.

Karen, who was panting even harder than Val, sweat dripping down her face, gave her a _look_ , and Val grinned.

They only allowed themselves that moment, and then they split apart and led their partners on another dance. Rax hardly seemed winded, lunging at her with just as much ferocity ten minutes in as he had when she'd first found him here all alone. That just wasn't fair.

But, she supposed, you could do what you wanted when your pawns couldn't say no.

The minutes crept by. A druid joined the battle, apparently thinking he could end this faster himself. Might have, too, except that Pidge was almost certainly tracking the progress of the fight by sound and stolen glances and noticed his arrival even before Val. By the time she'd processed the new threat, Pidge had skewered the man with their bayard and flung his sizzling corpse into the corner before returning to the computer with a string of muttered curses.

"Everything all right?" Val called.

"Peachy. Just give me a sec to flush out the rest of them, and don't hate me if we get a sudden influx of angry druids."

Karen got halfway through a protest before Val's ears popped and her helmet sealed itself shut, flashing a warning about air pressure. Rax continued, unperturbed, his own helmet similarly sealed, and Val ducked a swing as she pivoted to give Pidge a dirty look. "A little warning would be nice, you know!"

Pidge said nothing as two more druids appeared in the center of the room--just two, both of them wheezing through their masks as they fended off Pidge's assault. Val flicked her pistol's setting from training to standard mode and added a burst of fire. One of the druids flickered away, but the other wasn't fast enough.

"Who knew the trick to killing druids was to vent all the airlocks?" Pidge quipped as they finished off the other one.

"Funny," Val said. "You're lucky Haggar gave her paladins competent suits."

"I wouldn't have done it if she didn't." Pidge threw themself back into their chair at the computer, a ring around their helmet glowing softly green--the Olkari headset Ryner had given them, newly integrated into their armor to help with disabling the master key controller. It was faster than hacking, Pidge claimed, and the constant stream of information across their screens lent credence to that theory.

It seemed too few druids for a place like this. Just three? But no more appeared after Pidge's flush of the system, and they didn't start to repressurize the base immediatley, so anyone who was still around was, or soon would be, resoundingly dead.

Val still didn't trust it. It was too convenient--the fact that they'd only encountered three druids (though she supposed it was _possible_  Haggar had pulled the rest after Vindication reached its final stage), the fact that only two of the pilots had made it here to challenge them (though if the druids were smart, they'd have taken the others hostage once they realized the paladins' plan). The fact that neither Rax nor Zuza was armed.

There was one other explanation for the ease of the battle so far, she supposed, though she wasn't sure whether it was better or worse than the hostage scenario.

As though merely conceiving of the idea had manifested it into the universe, a pair of lasers split the air, one shattering the leftmost of Pidge's screens, the other missing Val's head by a hair.

With a yelp, she scrambled back and turned her pistol to the door, where Rolo and Sam stood, helmets sealed and faces blank.

Rolo and Sam, unlike the other two, had come into this fight armed. They each carried a bayard that matched their armor. The weapons looked the part, but there was something lackluster about them when the activated, transforming into utterly mundane Imperial pistols, like Haggar had replicated the basic concept of a bayard, but had missed out on the essence of it.

Val told herself not to underestimate those weapons. Sam’s, at least, had multiple forms. She couldn’t let herself be surprised, now of all times. She and Karen had more or less had it covered when it was just Rax and Zuza--strong opponents, tireless, but ultimately unarmed and, more importantly, easily managed.

Now?

Val ducked an attack from Rax and spun around him, jabbing a finger at Pidge, who had already half-risen from their chair. "Don't you _fucking_ dare, Pidge! You get those things shut down; _we'll_  deal with the cavalry."

It was bravado, but it was also the truth--sure, things would be easier if Pidge joined the fray, but it would only delay the inevitable. This battle only ended when the master keys turned off or half the room was dead.

That didn't mean Val couldn't even the odds a little. She pivoted into a kick that sent Rax stumbling backward, then reached for her Quintessence and a desperate bit of focus and flung a little bit of herself across the room. There was a curious sort of in-between, an instant when she saw the room from both perspectives, and from the corner of both sets of eyes, she thought she saw someone standing over Pidge.

The moment passed, Val settled back into her body--the first copy of it, at any rate--and her double charged Sam and Rolo with shield up as Val spun toward Pidge, gun raised.

There was no one there.

The realization froze her in place long enough for Rax to tackle her to the ground. Val cried out, throwing her head back hard enough to stun Rax. She wriggled out from under him and backed away, firing a few low-powered shots at Rolo to draw him off her double, though she tried not to look too squarely in that direction, lest the sight of herself throw her off her game.

"Pidge! I think your dad's trying to help!"

She didn't have time to say anything more, but Pidge knew what she was getting at. They all knew that Haggar had shielded the lions and the actual master key implants against technopathy as a precaution. It was very likely she'd done the same to this computer.

As Pidge dove into their work with renewed frenzy, Val found herself fending off Rax and Rolo at the same time, dodging fists and lasers alike and mostly just trying to stay alive.

She needed to even the odds a little more.

If she was honest, she hated herself a little bit for the ruthlessness with which she scanned the pilots for weakness, but Karen was already struggling, and Val couldn't coordinate with herself well enough to tackle the remaining pilots together, which left one of them up against two opponents at the same time, and that was a recipe for disaster. Even emaciated and untrained, mind-controlled soldiers could push themselves way too hard to call this an even fight.

It wasn't hard to see where her opening lay.

As Pidge cried out in triumph, Val kicked Rax away and charged Rolo with a roar. He backed away, almost entirely steady on his feet. He hid it well--the mind control hid it well--but Val knew he had a prosthetic leg. She knew the druids had taken it upon his arrival in Vindication and replaced it with a cybernetic version, probably in an effort to make him more formidable in fights like this.

She also knew, from her visits to the cell, that the incisions had never healed right and the only reason infection hadn’t already killed him was because Rax had been teaching himself to heal over the course of his captivity.

The master keys might not allow the prisoners to feel pain, but they couldn't damn well force a man to fight if he didn't have a leg to stand on.

Steeling her nerves and sending an apology to the ether for what she was about to do, Val charged in, catching Rolo's laserfire on her shield, and knocked the barrel of his rifle away. As he reeled from the first attack, she squared her stance and spun into a roundhouse that ended with her armored heel connecting squarely with the seam between flesh and cybernetic.

Rolo dropped soundlessly, and the fact that he wasn't screaming in pain almost made it worse. Almost, except that the battle wasn't done yet. Val ripped Rolo's gun out of his hands and flung it across the room, turning to face Rax as Rolo floundered on the floor. She begged him to just stay down, though she knew the master key wouldn't let him.

 _Hurry up, Pidge,_  Val thought. _This can't go on much longer._

* * *

"Admiral, some of the warships are breaking off."

"Good. Stay the course. Radio when they're in position. Anamuri, status."

Nyma smiled to herself as she circled around the rear guard, sniping at Haggar's reinforcements whenever she got the chance and otherwise charging in headlong to sow chaos. For all Lance's early vacillation--not to mention the way he'd been reduced to a gibbering mess the first time someone called him _Admiral Mendoza_ \--he'd found his footing up there in the command room. He doled out orders with an even tone and just enough urgency to get people to snap to attention without letting them descend back into panic and anarchy.

Lance would never hear it from her lips, but she was proud of the little snot. All grown up and commanding the universe's second-largest military.

Seemed to be doing a hell of a job of it, too. Had Nyma and most of their heavy hitters pounding the reinforcements like they were clawing their way toward escape, while smaller, quicker ships baited the autonomous Princes into a chase and cloaked flights ran targeted strikes against priority targets.

Nyma didn't have a map of the battlefield in front of her to know whether his plan was working--or even what his plan _was_ , in the long term--but if they were in trouble he was at least good at hiding it. Just in terms of managing the fleet, he might even be doing better than the old Command.

"Nyma," Lance said. "I need you to split off. Meri might need backup."

"On it." Nyma charged through one last ship before arcing back around toward the heart of the battle. The castle-ship and _Kera_  were taking heavy fire now that Lance had diverted most of their forces to the rear and the periphery of the battlefield, but neither shield had fallen, which meant they still had time to stall. Hopefully enough time.

The _Eryth_  was impossible to miss, even in the chaos. It was the second largest ship in the sky, but beyond even that, it was the vacuum around it and the occasional flashes of lightning that gave it away. Less lightning now than the last time Nyma had come through. By a _lot._

"Give me the run-down," Nyma said. "What's her status?"

"She should be heading to the last pocket of druids soon." Lance paused, barking orders to someone on the main line. "Akira left a few minutes ago to help Keith and Matt. Meri's holding it together, but Coran says she's struggling, however much she claims she doesn't need a rescue."

Nyma snorted. "Tell her she's fine. I don't do rescues."

"Oh, _really._  "

"Sure. Might come in to steal her thunder, though."

Lance laughed, and Nyma gunned it toward the _Eryth_ , enhancing the image as she blew past the dwindling Imperial support ranks. It was easy to pick out Meri's location--it was the only place on the entire ship that still had lightning in the air, though most of it was directed inward now, snapping at the heels of the lone figure in white.

And Meri was flagging. Nyma read exhaustion in every line of her body, even from half the battlefield away. Lightning still leapt easily to her fingers, but her aim was off, and every time she flickered to avoid a counterattack, it seemed to bow her back just a little bit more.

Nyma dialed back on Blue's long-range gun, narrowing the beam to its finest setting. It could still bisect a man in a single shot, but at least it wouldn’t take out the entire coven and Meri all in the same breath.

She silenced the comms, let Blue take control so a waver in their course didn't throw the shot off by a crucial two feet. The rest of the battle faded away, until it was just Nyma, the scope, and the trigger.

Meri flickered to the right side of the hangar, well away from Nyma's chosen target.

She pulled the trigger, and the druid's head and shoulders simply ceased to be.

The blast left the entire room stunned, Meri jolting back like Nyma's shot had come even remotely close to her, the druids freezing in place long enough for Nyma to adjust her aim and vaporize another.

Meri recovered at last, spearing the two nearest druids with lightning before they remembered the mysterious sniper wasn't their only enemy. About the time Meri finished off the last man, Nyma swung Blue in close to the hangar. Meri flipped her off, then leaped through the barrier into Blue's waiting maw.

Her irritation preceded her up the ramp, sharp and acrid with the stench of druidic magic. "I had that."

"And I'm a glory hog," Nyma replied easily, yielding the pilot's seat to a winded and listing Meri and climbing up to her sniper's nest above. "Lance, I've got her."

"Great work. Now, activate your cloak. I'm going to need you to sow a little more chaos in their ranks."

Nyma grinned. "Yes, sir, Admiral Paladin, sir."

" _Admiral?_ " Meri echoed, surprise and pride and a vicious delight blotting out her irritation for at least this one moment. Her voice promised endless teasing, and her mind was already spinning new nicknames to make Lance flush from his ears to his toes. Lance didn't bite down on his groan fast enough.

"You've missed a lot," Nyma said.

"And you can fill her in as you fly," Lance shot back. "Cloak, now."

Meri flicked a salute Lance couldn't see, switched on the cloak, and they disappeared into the shadows. "Yes, sir."

* * *

Even when Matt closed his eyes, he couldn't escape Vel-17. It was a film of grease that coated his skin, the scent of blood and urine and antiseptic burning his nose, a dry mouth filled with a sour, rotten taste. It was a cold that had settled into his bones.

 _An illusion,_  he told himself. _It's all just an illusion._

He knew that, but it didn't help. A flashback wasn't any less terrifying because it was in the past.

Keith was close, and at times, Matt could even sense him through the panic, as the rotten taste in his mouth sometimes came to the forefront enough for him to recognize Haggar's Quintessence, a dull, throbbing glow that coated every inch of this place.

The cell door opened, and Matt shrank back against the wall. They were coming for him. They were coming, and they were going to drug him, and they were going to drag him out to the E-dep chamber, where time and existence lost all meaning. He didn't want to go back to that.

But he couldn't stop them.

The guards came in, in their faceless armor and their towering height, and they reached for him--but instead of grabbing Matt, they grabbed his father, and Sam smiled as they hauled him off to his death.

_Matt!_

Keith's voice, in his head as much as in his ear. He sounded terrified, gasping for air, his core quivering with something like the shivers that wracked Matt's body.

 _It's an illusion,_ he told himself--told Keith, if Keith could hear him.

The terror faded, just a little, and Keith leaned into Matt as Matt leaned into Keith.

Akira roared into the space between them, Akira and Red--distant still, but sending the illusion up in a blaze. As the ashes of Vel-17 rained down around him, fading to the lava flows of the Heart, Matt caught glimpses of another illusion, of sands and blood and the roar of a crowd.

He entered the Heart disoriented and caught only a glimpse of his surroundings--Keith nearby, burned and bleeding until Matt blinked and the wounds disappeared; a shadow in the steam that might have been Akira.

He said nothing, and the Heart began to fade almost at once, but reassurance and comfort pressed in on him from all sides, a warmth that said Akira was coming, Red was _coming_ , to hold on, they'd be there soon.

For a flash, when the Heart faded, Matt was back in Vel-17, and his heart leaped into his throat. On reflex, he reached out for Keith--and was surprised to find him there, tangible and real. Matt heaved, and Vel-17 became the bloody sands of an arena. Keith stared at him, wide-eyed.

Keith's gaze shifted, and he hauled on Matt's arm, dragging him aside as Shiro appeared from nowhere, cybernetic arm blazing with heat and swinging for Matt's head.

"What the fuck?"

"Haggar," Keith said, in case that wasn't obvious. "She put me back at my Proof, but swapped Shiro for the other prisoner."

Matt scowled, leaping back as Shiro struck again. "Sounds about right. She had me in Vel-17, but my dad was there."

Keith growled, all helpless rage and frustration. Matt didn't need the bond to sympathize--but the bond was louder and closer than it had been before, maybe because Akira was close. The trip to the Heart hadn't been enough to break the illusion, but Matt supposed he shouldn't have expected it to. Haggar was wholly focused on the two of them, and more experienced than any other druid. Hell, she'd proven once before that she still knew how to twist the bond to her advantage, even after it had been severed. Going to the Heart was no way to slip her grip at all.

This entire illusion rested on the back of the bond, treating it like a direct line to Keith and Matt's minds.

Matt wondered what happened if he pulled on that line.

"Hold on," he told Keith, taking his hand and squinting at the Quintessence glow of the illusion around him. He reached for Haggar's Quintessence the way he'd reached for Keith a moment before, seizing hold of her as she tried to slip away.

Her surprise resonated through the bond when Matt finally found a grip, and he didn't wait for her to recover; he heaved with all his might, yanking on a chain he couldn't see. All at once, the arena disappeared.

They landed on dusty soil, gray-brown and cracked, only a few twisted, leafless trees rising from the impossibly flat plain. The sky overhead was darker than dark, stars and galaxies splashed across the night, impossibly vivid. There wasn't even a moon to drown out their light.

"Where are we?" Keith asked. His voice rang loud in the silence.

Matt turned a slow circle. "I don't know... Feels familiar, though..."

He stopped at the sight of two figures in the distance. Haggar, standing over a crumpled figure in blue paladin armor.

Haggar spun without warning, her robes flaring as she raised both hands and filled the air with lightning. Matt didn't bother running; where was there to hide out here? Instead he activated his shield and crossed his arms in front of his face, wincing as the lightning slammed into him. Yellow lightning. Pure Quintessence pouring into him, soaked up readily by the crystals seeded through his body.

Matt drew on that Quintessence before the crystals had a chance to grow. The lightning petered out. A swirl of smoke preceded Haggar's arrival to his right.

He ignited the air where Haggar appeared, winning a scream from her as she flickered again and reappeared thirty feet to the left. Keith was already moving, his sword thrusting toward her heart. It missed, of course, and Haggar retreated back to where she'd started, just a few feet from Lealle's corpse.

That's what this was, wasn't it? The barren soil, the dead, twisted trees? There should have been more here--Zarkon and the Black Lion, Lealle and Keturah's shuttles. But this illusion didn't show the unaltered truth of the past. That wasn't the point.

"You didn't count on this, did you, Keturah?" Matt called, calling down fire on her for a second time. Her gaze had stuck on Lealle for just a moment, and she was slow enough to teleport away that Matt's flames caught the edge of her robe. She glared at him, unleashing more lightning--black this time.

Keith should have been too far away for Matt to reach in time, but space here was fluid, like it was in the Heart, and Matt pivoted, wrapping himself around Keith just before the lightning reached him. Matt didn't fight it; it drained the last of what Haggar had pumped into him with her last attack, sapped the hungry crystals dry.

When it passed, Matt staggered, but Keith ducked around him and leaped at Haggar. He'd summoned the bayard now, too, a blade in each hand and both of them seeking flesh.

Matt dropped to one knee, breathing hard, but he tracked Haggar's progress around the plain. "Did we pull you in? Is that why you're so rattled? You didn't expect to have to face up to your own sins, did you?"

One hand lashed out toward Matt, but Keith was faster. Blood splattered to the ground as Haggar flickered away.

"I think I've figured it out, you know." Matt forced himself to stand, breathing evenly. He wasn't as good as Allura at pulling Quintessence from his surroundings, but his body did that for him, if slowly. And when he was wrapped in an illusion literally woven from Quintessence, it worked even better. He would have to stall a bit here, but he'd wager Haggar was used to her targets staying down just a little bit longer than this. "You didn't craft these illusions directly; you don't know us well enough for that. For all your spying, for all your scheming, you don't really know us at _all_. You just spun this illusion to hit us where we're weak.

"Is this your weakness, Keturah? Do you feel bad for killing her? Are you even capable of remorse anymore?"

She rounded on him, and Matt compacted the Quintessence he'd recovered into a pellet in her chest. She flickered away. Keith swung again with both swords.

She landed once more beside Lealle like she couldn't help but return there again and again, called back to the Lealle's side by guilt or regret or satisfaction.

The deep lines on her shadowed face didn't look very satisfied.

"She was your friend," Matt hissed. "She _trusted_  you. And you threw her away."

With a scream, Haggar flung herself across the barren plain, reappearing directly in front of Matt. He stumbled back, and the world around him tilted on an angle as his foot, somehow, found empty air.

Lightning crackled in Haggar's hands as he teetered there, the illusion beginning to split apart at the edges. The barren moon stripped away to reveal the throne room--Lealle's corpse the throne, Keith charging across the dais toward Haggar. Toward Matt, who'd reached the edge of the catwalk over the techs' stations fifteen feet below.

Quintessence coursed through his body, and Matt scrambled to redirect it, to pull it out of the crystals before it could do any damage, but he was falling. One horrified moment suspended between illusion and reality.

He landed on his bad leg, and the barely-there ache in his knee, his constant companion, easily ignored, flared into something bigger, hotter, and brighter, a white-hot glare to match the golden fire of Haggar's lightning. They consumed him, a supernova that blotted out all else until the darkness and the silence rushed in to extinguish it all.

* * *

Shiro had only seen Altea in borrowed memories, but even so it was bittersweet to be here, the scent of juniberries in the air, the shadows of a city long-gone haunting the edges of his vision. The ruins were still here--metal slopes and columns of stone sticking up from the earth at odd angles. The grass and the ivy had reclaimed most of it; the metal was more rust than substance and the stone was crumbling away.

But the ghosts remained, and Allura remembered the mountains in the distance, the rolling hills and the flash of silver water visible between them. Her memories plucked at him, resonant, the bond pulled taut between them like a bowstring.

She knew this place.

She knew what it _had been._

They chased Zarkon across the ruins of a city that should have been home to millions. Through thicket and over cliff, skeletons of ancient architecture spilling from the earth at every turn. Was he doing this just to taunt Allura? They'd never known him to be a coward, but he ran, and he didn't look back.

Until he stopped, turning, the black bayard coming to life in his hands. Shiro was a few paces ahead of Allura at the moment, and he had less than a second to bring his shield up before Zarkon slammed a hammer into him, lifting him clear off his feet and tossing him down the slope of the little rise Zarkon had staked a claim to.

A spiderweb of fissures ran through Shiro's shield as he picked himself up, head spinning, arm throbbing from shoulder to wrist. He glanced to where Allura was, her staff raised over her head as she leaped at Zarkon and brought the staff down. He caught it easily on the shaft of his hammer and turned her attack aside, and the bayard turned molten, shifting into a sword nearly as long as he was tall.

Shiro dismissed his shield and extended his wrist blades as he charged back up the slope.

"Do you know where we are, Princess?" Zarkon asked. "Do you recognize this place?"

Allura didn't answer, but Zarkon gestured with his sword.

"Look around. You see the remnants of the crystal colonnade? The royal airfield? Your ancestors' statues have seen better days, I suppose, but--"

"The palace was lost to me long before today, Zarkon," Allura said coldly. "If you think you can get under my skin by bringing me here, then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed."

"Oh?" Zarkon smiled. "Then I suppose you won't be interested to know that this is the very spot where your father breathed his last."

Shiro reached Allura as her stance went rigid, cold fury radiating off her in waves.

"It's true." Zarkon raised the bayard, turning it over so the sunlight caught the serrated edge of the blade. "The bayard drank his blood here. I watched the life leave his eyes."

Allura howled, her body growing by several inches as she swung her staff for Zarkon's head.

He smiled.

As the blow connected, Altea vanished. Night bled into the sky overhead; water lapped at Shiro's feet. A cool, salty breeze brought a rumble of thunder. Black's eyes turned toward the duel, and Zarkon tilted his head as though chasing the sound of her voice. He'd brought the bayard around faster than Shiro could track, catching Allura's staff easily. Both weapons glowed iridescent in the starlight, and Allura's eyes widened in fear as she recognized the Heart of the Black Lion.

"How--?"

Zarkon flowed around her as easily as smoke on the wind, and Allura stumbled as her staff suddenly found nothing but open air to resist it.

"How did I bring us here?" Zarkon asked, a thrum of laughter in his voice. "Practice. I was a paladin for _decades_ , Princess. I know this place better than you. I have mastered it, as I mastered the Black Lion."

Shiro's lip curled. "If you mastered her, then how did she shut you out?"

Anger flashed in Zarkon's eyes, and he closed the distance between them in a blink. Shiro was well used to the strange ways of the Heart--how time and space meant very little here, and he could often find himself crossing a considerable distance with a single step.

Zarkon took it to another level. He swung for Shiro's face, and Shiro caught it on his shield, but an instant later, Zarkon was behind him, and his blade bit into Shiro's back. Shiro turned, and he was already gone.

"Do not speak to me of mastery, _Champion_ ," Zarkon spat. "You are children playing at things you cannot comprehend."

Allura bled across the ocean, the butt of her staff catching Zarkon in the gut before he realized what had happened. She spun, following up with a blow to the head, and Shiro charged into the fray, angling for a spot just out of Allura's reach. Sure enough, her next attack missed as Zarkon pulled himself back--and directly into the path of Shiro's blades.

"You underestimate us, Zarkon," he said, dropping into a sweeping kick that should have taken Zarkon out at the ankles.

Instead, Zarkon flowed away, his sword lengthening as he brandished it into a segmented whip that lashed out toward Shiro, who raised a hand to deflect it.

The bladed whip curled around his wrist, serrated teeth sinking into his armor, a few finding flesh. Shiro strained backward as Zarkon tried to haul him forward off his feet. His wrist blade caught between two segments, and with a hair-raising shriek was sheared off at the base. The blade fell into the water and vanished from sight.

Shiro felt Allura approaching from behind, a ghost skimming over the waves. He twisted, pulling back on the bayard with all his might. His boots slipped against the sandy ocean floor, but he caught himself and held firm.

Allura appeared before him, hooking her staff around Zarkon's whip, holding it by both ends, and heaving. Shiro stumbled and caught himself on Allura, but Zarkon was pulled off his feet entirely, landing with a splash in the shallow ocean, the bayard falling from his grip. It deactivated as it fell, freeing Shiro's wrist.

For the first time, a flicker of fear entered Zarkon's eyes. He scrambled forward, kicking up waves as he searched for the bayard. Allura descended on him, and he looked up, momentarily petrified. Then, with one final sweep of his arms, he found the bayard and, grasping it, flickered away.

 _The bayard's what's holding him here,_ Shiro realized, rubbing his wrist as Black's memories danced in the roiling water around him. Other battles, long since past. Zarkon descending on his enemies, thrusting the bayard into Black's console to force her into action.

 _ **It is a piece of me,**_  Black said, her voice hardly a whisper on the wind. She said no more, and Shiro had to wonder if she was afraid Zarkon would overhear. He held a piece of her in his hand, a weapon he could use to control her or, evidently, to enter her Heart.

Setting his sights on the bayard, Shiro charged in, ducking and dodging Zarkon's attacks and letting Allura deflect the worst of them. Shiro's shield was one solid hit away from shattering, and he was down a blade as well. He would have to be careful.

But Zarkon was worried now, too. The bayard kept shifting form, from sword to hammer to staff to rifle. He tried to keep Shiro and Allura at a distance, having realized neither of them was well-suited to ranged combat, but it was two-on-one, and range was hard to control in a place like this.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Shiro felt Black in the bayard. It roared with her voice, pulsed with her pain. When Zarkon landed a blow, Black cried out in sorrow.

The bayard was much more than a simple weapon. It was tethered to Zarkon, as Shiro was tethered to Allura, and to Black. Shiro could wrestle it away from Zarkon, but he needed to overwrite the bond if he wanted to keep it.

Unfortunately for Zarkon, he'd brought the bayard into Black's Heart, into the very seat of her power--and he was far from the master of his old lion.

 _You ready?_  he asked Black, and received a rumble in return, a gathering storm, the threat of a fury about to be unleashed. Allura caught his eye and nodded, having gleaned his plan. She launched into a flurry of attacks, letting her rage and grief pour out, letting herself be just sloppy enough that Zarkon would take the bait and toy with her for a moment.

Shiro closed his eyes and focused, descending deeper into the Heart, deeper than the ocean and the stars, down where no light penetrated, where all around was the essence of the Black Lion. The bond was currents in the darkness here, tangible in a way Shiro himself no longer was. It was a network stretching forward and back through time, connecting all of Black's paladins, tying the bayard to her soul.

Zarkon's bond had been severed, but he'd held onto the bayard, wedging himself in here like a parasite. His presence was a solitary light in the darkness, burning a sickly purple and leeching into the bond.

Shiro reached out for the pin that held Zarkon in this space, and he pulled.

Zarkon's roar dragged him back to the shallow sea, just in time to see the bladed whip coming for him, one last, desperate attack of a man who knew he was beaten. Shiro raised his hand. The whip lashed around it, snapping Shiro's other wrist-blade in two.

Black arrived with a roar, wind and waves swirling around a kotha as black as night who stood just behind Shiro, his shadow and his strength. He twisted his wrist and closed his fingers around the whip. The blades didn't cut him; the whip didn't uncoil when Zarkon, in a panic, flicked to release it.

Black butted her head against his back, and Shiro called the bayard to him.

It fell into his grip without a fight, reverting to its inactive form, and something slid back into place inside his chest.

"No," Zarkon whispered.

But it was too late. Allura whirled, rearing her staff back and thrusting the butt of it into Zarkon's chest. Quintessence danced like starlight across her skin, and with that single blow, she forced him from the Heart.

* * *

Lance stared at the mess of notes and icons and readouts around him, the universe's biggest game of _eshet_ \--one with real lives on the line. He'd lost track of how long the battle had been going on, marking time only by the number of allies he'd lost.

The number was already in the thousands.

Part of him wanted to foist command back onto Coran, to run and hide his head in the sand and only worry about the people he _could_  save and not the ones he couldn't.

He couldn't do that, though. Not when they were so close to winning this. If he could just hold out for a little bit longer...

Half the fleet was still concentrating fire on the reinforcements. Haggar's loyalists had actually split away from the main fleet to provide backup for the backup. She was so focused on keeping the Coalition contained she hadn't even noticed that most of the other half of the fleet had vanished right out of the battlefield.

That part had been surprisingly easy. A fireball here to fake the destruction of a flight or two, a sudden massive push from the castle and _Kera_  to distract as another few dozen ships slipped away and quietly raised their cloaks.

And now Blue was cloaked, too, but blatantly darting strikes against the Princes to keep them panicked and focused one one particular patch of empty space.

The last of the Princes' ships fell into line, and Lance's heart began to pound. He'd had the fleet draw them deeper into battle, lined up on either side of the Coalition forces with Blue attacking from the outside. He was counting on them to be paying more attention to Blue than to the fleet they had trapped--and he was gambling on their pettiness and lack of coordination to get them in a position where they didn't know where their own allies were.

"Now or never," he muttered, trading looks with Coran. All through the battle, Coran had been unflappable, leaping to execute Lance's orders with cool efficiency, always ready with a smile whenever Lance turned his way, offering advice and suggestions without ever once questioning Lance's competence. The castle-ship was flagging, shields in the red and fading fast, but you wouldn't have knowing it looking at Coran.

Lance closed his eyes.

"Now!" he barked. "Blue Lion, through the middle; everyone else clear out! Hit them from below!"

The remnants of the central fleet--quick or heavily armored ships he'd left to clear out the rabble and generally throw up a screen of chaos between the two lines of Princes--broke off in a blink, reversing direction so quickly, in some cases, that their pursuers had to swerve to avoid a fiery collision--and sometimes swerved into their own allies.

At the same moment, Blue twisted to catch a carefully aimed burst of friendly fire. It was too weak to do any damage, but the streak of laserfire, flash of shields, and subsequent "failure" of Blue's cloak fed into the panic Nyma and Meri had so expertly sowed among the Princes. Not a one of them paused to wonder whether Blue had showed herself deliberately; she charged through the center of the battlefield, and the Princes unleashed every weapon in their arsenal.

The remaining Imperial fighters and gunners, already thrown into chaos by the sudden evaporation of their target pool, were shredded in the cross-fire. The bulk of the barrage kept going, criss-crossing the empty battlefield and lighting it up like the Fourth of July. Blue took a few hits, her shields screaming, and Lance's throat closed.

She made it through in one piece.

The Princes weren't all so lucky.

Shields flickered and fell. Hulls were torn open. Weapons, engines, hangars, even bridges were mangled before anyone cottoned on enough to order a ceasefire.

And the portion of the fleet that had broken away to provide an avenue for the Blue Lion came back from below, sectioning off, a swarm for each of the Princes, shredding ships where shields had fallen and battering the few shields that remained until Anamuri and Coran's crew took pity on the stragglers and finished them off.

There was a brief lull in fire from the other side as the reinforcements reeled from the wave of destruction. Before they could recover and launch into a typical Imperial take-'em-down-with-us style blitz attack, Lance gave the signal to Mirek, who opened a call to the remainder of the Imperial fleet.

"It's over, my friends," Mirek said, mercy in her voice and not a little gloating. "The battle is ours. But there's still a chance for you. Lay down your arms, raise a signal of surrender, and you can keep your lives..."

Lance only half-listened to her speech. He'd coached her on the broad points but left the details up to her. It would be more authentic that way--Galra to Galra, fitted to the language of the Empire. Lance figured it would be more effective, too, both for swaying Galra who really didn't want to die for Zarkon's cause and just wanted some assurance there was another option--and for weeding out those who might surrender in bad faith.

If there was one thing he'd learned, it was that a good, loyal Imperial soldier couldn't stand to see a fellow Galra defect. Hopefully that hatred would blind them to the opportunities surrender opened up.

(There would be some, he knew. Some smart loyalists, and some cowards. The Coalition would have to deal with them as they came. For now, he just wanted this to be _over._ )

"The choice is yours," Mirek finished. "Listen to me or don't. I'm just the one trying to save your lives."

Lance gave the cue, and the other half of the fleet, now formed up around the reinforcements' rear line, dropped their cloaks. The battle had shifted, numbers and battlefield position both squarely in the Coalition's favor. It had to be enough.

Silence reigned for long moments, no one in the command room or on the comms daring to speak. Lance hardly dared _breathe._ Weapons glowed white-hot, primed for a massacre, and though Lance prayed it wouldn’t come to that, he stood ready to give the order.

A light flashed on the comms panel, and one of Coran’s techs all but fell over herself to receive the call. She froze, closed her eyes.

A moment later, the holographic icon representing one of the remaining warships pulsed yellow as a mark of surrender appeared above it.

Lance breathed a sigh of relief as more ships followed suit--not all of them; it would never have been _all_. But enough. He didn't know if it was the Princes' crushing defeat that pushed them over the edge, if it was rumors of Voltron's mercy or Mirek's persuasiveness or the campaign of testimonials Eli's team had gathered, or if it was plain old fear.

He didn't care. Those who had chosen surrender fell back as the loyalists readied for one final barrage.

In a silent shower of laserfire, it was over.

* * *

The battle changed entirely once they left the Heart. Allura could feel it in the way Zarkon moved. He had lost the bayard, had lost the realm that gave him a finer control over his movements than Allura and Shiro. He was reeling, unarmed, stumbling over the uneven terrain of what had once been a beautiful and prosperous city.

He'd laid the groundwork for his own destruction the day he razed this city, the day he killed Allura's father. He couldn't lay the fault for that at Keturah's feet. He couldn't pretend she'd lied to him, tricked him, spurred Daibazaal's council to aggression he didn't fully agree with.

He was a murderer. A tyrant. Perhaps Keturah had set him on that path, but Zarkon was the one who had walked it.

Shiro was a blur, the bayard moving like an extension of his body. It flowed seamlessly from sword to shield to spear and back again, warding Zarkon off, pushing him where Shiro wanted him to go. Zarkon's armor was formidable, his size and strength impressive. Whatever magic Keturah had woven to extend his life had done more than merely sustain him. 

He'd _thrived_  over the last ten thousand years, stronger and tougher now than he'd ever been when Allura had known him. Even unarmed, he was a threat, and Shiro had to be careful to stay out of his grasp.

Allura chose a different tack.

She stepped back from the battle, tracked Shiro and Zarkon's progress across the slopes and ruins. Zarkon broke off what might have once been an arm from a toppled statue and hurled it at Shiro's head; Shiro drove his sword into the ground at Zarkon's feet, shearing off the lip of the small cliff on which he stood. As it crumbled, it revealed layers of stone and metal and crystal that might have dated back to the razing of the planet.

Allura planted her staff against the crumbling stone underfoot, poured her Quintessence through it into the ground around her. It pooled in shattered crystals, multiplied in the ivy and the weeds. She claimed this land, this city, and filled it with herself, until she felt every footfall, every breath that disturbed the air around her.

A web of enchantments encircled Zarkon, woven into his skin and bones and blood. She recognized Keturah in them, recognized druidic magic and Pygnarat arts and strange amalgams of them both.

This was a spell Keturah had laid on him in the early days of his conquest. He'd been middle-aged when the war began, already past his prime. Once they'd realized the task before them, to find the lions scattered across the universe, they must have known it was a task that outlived them both.

Allura traced the threads of magic, plucked on a strand and watched as Zarkon froze.

Shiro's spear pierced his side, and Zarkon gasped as he dropped to his knees.

Yanking the spear free, Shiro fell back, his bayard reverting to its inactive form as he watched Zarkon's blackened blood drip from the wound. It wilted flowers where it fell, scorched the weeds and seeped into the stone, leaving loose dust behind.

And the wound began at once to knit itself together. Regeneration, agelessness, endurance and supernatural strength... Keturah really had done her best to make him immortal.

Allura stepped lightly over the rubble of her home, her eyes on the horizon, where the sun had just begun to dip behind the mountains. Long shadows reached their fingers across the battlefield.

She stopped with her toes nearly touching Zarkon's hands. He looked up at her.

"You were a good man once, Zarkon," she whispered. "A true friend."

His lips twisted into a smirk. "Are you going to spare me, _Princess_? Spare me like your mother tried to?"

"My mother tried to _save_  you. She came to you when there was still a good man left _to_  save."

"But you know better." He laughed, blood oozing from a now-healed cut on his forehead. "I'm a monster now, is that it? An enemy to be defeated? A blight upon the land."

"Tell me you're not," she said. "Convince me there's still good in you. Give me a reason to show you mercy, and I'll spare your life."

He laughed. "Such arrogance. Why should I have to prove myself to you?"

She plucked again on the enchantment tethering him to this world. “Because I’m the one who decides whether you die today.”

His smile widened, twisted. Taunting. He was never going to change. Allura knew it, and Zarkon wasn’t even going to pretend otherwise. “You are your father’s daughter, I see.”

"No," she said, reaching out her hand, feeling the pulse of magic that was all that tied Zarkon to this life. "I am myself."

She closed her fist and severed the ties of magic. Zarkon closed his eyes, breathed once more.

And then he crumbled to dust, reclaimed by the past he'd been running from for so long.

* * *

Hunk could hardly breathe as he stepped up to the cannon's control pod, a metal sphere barely large enough for a single person mounted in a socket at the center of the control annex. A viewscreen at the front of the sphere projected a view of the sky above the mountains alongside coordinates and headings for the wormhole he had yet to open and status reports on the cannon itself.

They'd finally gotten it up and running after fifteen unbearable minutes of last-minute adjustments and two failed starts.

But it was good to go now, the entire cavern humming as the panels on the wall that had been gathering energy for weeks now began to focus it through the myriad lenses to the chamber hanging from the ceiling in the center of the cavern. The panels had been the first thing Aransha's team repaired, and she estimated they had enough stored power for one shot. The second would drain them dry and then leech Quintessence from the cavern to try to augment the stores.

If that shot didn't kill them all, then a third certainly would.

No pressure, or anything. Hunk was just firing a brand new EM cannon, _blind_ , at an unkillable monster multiple galaxies away. Why not add a harsh shot limit on top of that?

The gunner's pod had been designed for Aransha or one of her senior technicians to use, and Hunk didn't quite fit the space right. It was cramped and dark and the manual controls were _just_  too far away to be comfortably within reach. They'd expected to fire this thing with the help of the Olkari arts, after all, to run whatever complex calculations they needed to find their aim and to make sure every piece of the cannon and its targeting system was running in perfect sync.

Hunk had a keypad where he could enter coordinates and a heading for his wormhole, some levers to adjust his aim once the wormhole was set, and a trigger.

"Is everyone clear?" Hunk called, turning up the comms so he could hear over the rushing of blood in his ears.

"As many as are going to get clear," Aransha said. At Hunk's request, she'd sent all nonessential staff out the cavern's emergency exit--a long, steep tunnel on the northwestern slope that could be traversed using small freight transports. Instead of a full hour for the elevator to descend and then return to the surface, they could get out that way in about twenty minutes, and Aransha had directed her surface crew to grab them and go, and not to wait for the rest of them.

If they ended up needing that third shot, Hunk didn't want to take the entire engineering corps down with him.

A dozen people had remained below with Hunk and Aransha to finish bringing the cannon online. They had nothing to do now but watch and wait and pray that Hunk didn't miss the shot.

"You should go now, too," Hunk said. "You might be able to get far enough to escape the effects of the second shot."

"It wouldn't help with the third," Aransha said. "And if anything goes wrong, you'll need us here."

"It's our home," someone else said. He sounded impossibly young--something that made Hunk sad until he realized that the man who'd spoken probably wasn't any younger than Hunk himself.

They were all out here, lives on the line, just trying to give their families a shot at a better future.

"Shay, we're ready," Hunk said. Yellow responded to his unspoken question and sent him her present coordinates and an estimate of how far behind them the Vkullor was.

It wasn't a happy number.

"Your timing is impeccable, Hunk," Shay said, a smile in her voice that didn't quite manage to clear the despair from her song. "I had only just begun to worry."

"Well don't stop yet. I've still got to _hit_  the damn thing." He entered the coordinates into the computer, running a quick simulation of both Yellow and the Vkullor's trajectories. There were two ways he could come at this, he figured. He could open a wormhole parallel to their flight path and try to fire as the Vkullor flew in front of it--in which case he only had to worry about his aim in one dimension, and the timing would take care of the horizontal component. He was more likely to hit the Vkullor, but if he shot too late he might miss the vital organs.

Or he could aim head-on. Open a wormhole directly behind Shay, aimed down the Vkullor's gullet. A hit in this case was almost certain to be fatal--as certain as anything about this was--but aiming and timing would both be that much harder.

He had to play it safe, right? Now wasn't the time for risky stunts and do-or-die. He wasn't a Red; he was Yellow: steady, dependable.

He opened the wormhole, and the front of his pod lit up with a view of open space on the other side. At first he saw only stars, but then a streak of yellow passed him by, the distant strains of the song swelling to a crescendo before they faded once more. Hunk glanced at the simulation, held his breath, squeezed the trigger.

The lenses around the chamber began to glow, though the energy they transmitted to the focusing chamber overhead was invisible. Power built in the chamber--too slowly, and the Vkullor's head flashed past the wormhole a split second before the cannon fired, so massive it looked like someone had drawn a curtain over the stars.

The curtain--initially a dark gray flecked with ribbons of green and red--suddenly flashed over to an acid green so bright Hunk had to look away. The Vkullor had passed before he risked a glance back, and he closed the wormhole with shadows still dancing across his vision.

"I think you made it angry," Shay said, breathless and faint, and Hunk's heart constricted. If he closed his eyes, he could almost see it through hers, a steady pulse of green and crimson, no longer flashes in the night but a constant beacon, rippling outward from the spot where the cannon had hit.

He'd injured it, but not enough to stop it.

"I'm going to have to take another shot," he told Aransha. His mouth hung open after he'd finished speaking, an apology hanging on his lips. He didn't voice it, though he knew this might be the end. They had estimates of how much Quintessence this next show would draw from the ground--and from all of them--but they were only estimates.

"Do it," Aransha said.

Yellow sent him a new set of coordinates, and his heart fell when he saw that the Vkullor had closed the distance.

"What?" Shay asked, even before he said anything.

He shook his head. "I need to make this shot count. I don't know if I'll have another chance."

"Then make it count."

"You don't understand." He rubbed his eyes, helpless tears threatening to fall. He refused to let them. Not when the stakes were this high; not when he had so many people counting on him. "I was going to open the wormhole behind you. Shoot at the Vkullor head-on. But there's not enough room now. I can't open the wormhole and fire the cannon in time." If the Quintessence drain didn't kill them, the mangled corpse of a wormhole-shredded Vkullor falling from the sky very well might.

Shay was quiet for a moment, her song losing its desperate edge. "Open it ahead of me."

"What? No--Shay, if this beam hits you, you'll die."

"I will not let it hit me. Open it well ahead of me. I will lead the Vkullor to it, you can fire the cannon, and I will get out of the way."

He didn't like the idea of Shay flying into the barrel of the giant gun he was about to shoot, but they were running out of options, and the Vkullor was pissed off and about to take it out on the only target it had.

"Fine." Hunk adjusted the wormholes coordinates and bearing and opened it, praying this worked out.

One shot. They had to make it count.

He saw the Vkullor first, brilliant and angry and terrifyingly close. Shay was a smaller shadow in front of it, as small as a flea, with nowhere to go to escape the wrath of the beast.

With the wormhole open, her song redoubled, clearer than the bond at such a distance, intimately familiar and instantly known. He leaned into it, falling into rhythm, starting up a countermelody to draw her in closer. He didn't look at the readouts around him; he didn't need to. He knew exactly where Shay was. He saw her twirl across the sky as the Vkullor opened its mouth and spewed destruction to the stars.

Closer. He could taste her fear now, sharp and bitter, but only a surface layer to the resounding trust that kept her hands steady on the controls. She dodged the Vkullor's attacks, swung wide to keep a stray shot from plunging into the wormhole and destroying all of Klenahn, but she kept her eyes on the wormhole, listened to Hunk's voice like a countdown, stayed the course, kept the rhythm.

Closer. He flipped the switch to pull power into the focusing chamber overhead. Shay sang of love and hope and a future.

Closer. He felt her inside him, a heartbeat synced to his own. The panels on the walls flickered. The cannon sated its thirst on the life in the earth around it.

" _Now!"_

The cannon discharged, a silent recoil driving home the leaden feeling in his limbs that spoke to the cannon's toll.

The Yellow Lion, looming large in the simulated view of the other side of the wormhole, darted aside.

The Vkullor opened its mouth, rows upon rows of tiny structures descending deep into its gullet flaring brighter and brighter as it prepared to attack.

The wall of flesh swelled to fill his field of vision, and every inch of it flashed a sharp, acid green.

Hunk closed the wormhole, and he prayed.

In the silence that followed, Hunk felt drained, in every sense of the word. He couldn't pry his hand from the trigger, couldn't lift his head where it had lolled back against the headrest. He heard murmurs on the comms, closed his eyes and hoped for the best--and he saw, through Shay’s eyes, a shadow: dark and drifting, the light bleeding from the scales, maw open in a final, impotent, roar.

"Hunk," Shay whispered, tears in her voice. "We did it."

* * *

The difference, once Pidge had destroyed the safeguards Vindication techs had put in place against technopathy, was astounding. The shields dropped, and the cavalry rushed in.

Pidge could sense their activity, if not the minds behind it. With the Olkari headset, the entire computer network felt like a spider's web with them as the spinner, every action vibrating through their core. There were at least two of them, if not all three. Pidge liked to imagine they could tell their dad apart from the others, but they had to be honest. One command to bring up a directory of files was just like any other.

It was still a strange experience to have a computer they were psychically plugged into suddenly come alive. By some unspoken agreement, Sam and whoever else was helping him left the center screen for Pidge's use, occasionally sending files or encryptions their way but mostly using the other screens to pour through everything the controller had to offer.

After a moment of stunned stillness, Pidge dove back into the work. There was a lot of information here--and they started a full file transfer just in case they needed any of this down the line--but the most important thing right now was to find an off switch somewhere in the code. It had to exist; the staff here had left everyone but Zuza to build their bonds in between battles, which meant they had to be able to turn it off.

The question was _where?_

The sounds of battle behind them didn't help with concentration. The fact that it was mostly a silent fight--heavy breathing and the occasional grunt on the comms, but no other sounds--made it all the worse. Pidge had held the airlocks open for ten minutes, to be sure any stragglers were good and dead, but they were sealed again now, the base slowly restoring pressure. The readout on Pidge's helmet said it was slow going.

So maybe it wasn't that the fight was quiet; maybe they just couldn't hear it. They certainly couldn't tell how close the fighting was to the computer at the back of the room. Their hand itched to summon their bayard, but they resisted. Someone would warn them if they needed to defend themself. Someone would notice.

Pidge's job quickly became to break through security, leaving their silent partners to sift through whatever there was to find on the other side. It was an easy rhythm to fall into. Brute force a password here, find a backdoor there, slip into the biometrics database and feed it back to itself until someone's credentials worked.

They were so focused on the work that they didn't notice that someone had found the switch and flipped it until Val gave a breathless cry of surprise.

Pidge whipped around, distractedly noticing that the flurry of activity on the supplemental monitors had stopped, and found the prisoners collapsed, like puppets with their strings cut. Karen and Val wavered for a moment, guns readied for a sudden resurgence, but the seconds ticked by, and no attack came.

That wasn't to say they were still. Rax and Zuza stirred, fingers twitching, legs curling toward the fetal position, though neither of them seemed to have the energy to move that far. Rolo crossed an arm over his face, the other creeping down his side toward a leg that sat at an unnatural angle.

"Is it over?" Val asked, the two copies of herself collapsing into one between one heartbeat and the next. She glanced at Pidge, her gun wavering.

Resting their hand on the console behind them, Pidge dug up the comms frequencies for the others' armors and opened a general line.

Rolo's muffled sobs ripped a hole straight through Pidge's heart, and Val dropped to her knees beside him an instant later. "Oh, god," she whispered, hands hesitating in the air over him as he grit his teeth and constrained himself to tense, pained gasps. "I'm _so_  sorry, Rolo. I'm--fuck. We'll get you back to the castle. We'll fix you up."

"'s okay," he managed, reaching out to clasp her arm. "Never liked this leg anyway."

Val's shaky laugh broke the spell hovering over the room. As Rax struggled to pull himself toward a shivering Zuza, Pidge dashed to the door, their mother close behind, to where Sam had fallen.

"Dad?" they cried. " _Dad._ "

They dropped to their knees and skidded to a stop beside him, reaching out a trembling hand for his shoulder.

Before they quite knew what happened, they world flipped on its back, and their dad was atop them, his hands around their neck, his eyes shot through with Quintessence yellow.

"Pidge!"

Karen lunged for Sam, trying to pull him off, but he shoved her away, first with an elbow, then letting go of Pidge with one hand to give himself better leverage. Pidge sucked in a breath, tears stinging their eyes.

A horrible, familiar laugh filled their ears as Sam went back to strangling them.

"You didn't think I'd let you have him, did you, Karen?" Keena asked. "You stole my kid. Now I'm going to take yours."

* * *

"Matt!"

Keith's vision blurred, illusion and reality competing for his attention. The illusion had started to fall apart, whether because Haggar had lost focus or because she'd deliberately ripped it apart, he didn't know. It still clung to him in bits and pieces, Lealle's corpse staring up at him, bloody sand sucking at his feet, the cold shadows of Vel-17 creeping in around him.

He fixed his eyes on the blank gray panels and narrow catwalk of the throne room, racing toward the spot where Matt had disappeared from view. His screams had cut off by now, but the silence they left behind was worse.

Haggar spun as he approached, her arm turning to smoke as he swung, and solidifying again quick enough to grab him by the throat and throw him backwards. He hit the ground and slid, his shoulder jarring against the base of the throne.

She left him there, turned, vanished.

Matt groaned in pain.

Keith scrambled to his feet, his swords scraping against the ground, and charged after her, but the roar that rattled in his chest came from the opposite side of the room. Akira burst through the doors, dark smears across his armor and a bloody gash down one arm speaking to the gauntlet he'd run to make it here.

His presence steadied Keith's pounding heart. He found his balance and leaped from the dais as Akira tackled Haggar around the waist, dragging her away from Matt's prone body. She kicked him away, but Akira came back in an instant, snarling, clawing, his gun all but forgotten as he went after her.

Keith landed beside Matt and dropped to one knee, wincing at the sight of Matt's leg, which was twisted at an odd angle. His brow furrowed with pain, but he cracked an eye as Keith reached out for him, and lifted one hand to clasp Keith's.

"I'm not that easy to get rid of," he said with a hint of a smile. Keith would have returned it, but the electric blue of his left eye was too bright to be a good sign.

Akira grunted, and Keith looked up to see him rubbing his jaw. As Haggar's body began to blur, he lunged, sinking fingers into her insubstantial form but somehow finding purchase. When she teleported to the catwalk overhead, she brought Akira with her, and he drew his pistol, firing into her abdomen while she was still staring at him in annoyance.

The laser punched through her, bending her double, but she slipped Akira's grasp and teleported away somewhere out of Keith's line of sight.

"Go on," Matt said, struggling to prop himself up on his elbows. He winced as his leg twisted, but waved away Keith's concern. "Akira needs you more than I do right now."

Keith hesitated, but Akira came sailing off the catwalk at that moment, rolling as he landed and launching back to his feet by the time Haggar followed him. Gritting his teeth, Keith re-summoned the bayard and charged in.

Haggar was as slippery as ever, flickering away from every attack that came her way. Keith and Akira moved in tandem, each intrinsically aware of where the other was, neither needing to say what they needed the other to do. Red was out in force, lending a power and ferocity to Akira's attacks that flowed seamlessly into Akira's more calculated strikes. They alternated between pistol, teeth, and claws--and it was hard not to think of them as claws, the way Akira fought.

It wasn't enough. Haggar was too fast, too good. She didn't have time to attack, but they weren't wearing her down, either.

Not until Matt got in on the game.

Keith didn't even realize what was happening at first. He charged in, dodged, countered, spun in anticipation of Haggar's counter attack. He flowed around Akira, and Akira flowed around him, and if they both avoided that edge of the catwalk or this tile of the lower floor, then that was just coincidence.

At least until Haggar missed a step. Akira had suddenly reversed direction, Keith spinning aside, and Haggar moved into the space they left.

Her foot had barely touched the ground when a fireball ignited within the folds of her robes. She howled, disappearing in a wisp, and the fire went out between the here and the there, but her robe was still smoldering, a hole burned through it right down to the charred skin underneath.

Keith risked a glance at Matt, who grinned and closed his fist. Keith couldn't sense the flow of his Quintessence--maybe Haggar couldn't either, because she eyed the room like the minefield it no doubt was by now. He'd been planting bombs all over the place, siphoning off the excess Quintessence and laying traps for Haggar at the same time. Keith and Akira couldn't see the Quintessence mines, either, of course, but they didn't have to. They were _Matt's_ , and they knew intrinsically where they were.

Haggar tried again, perhaps thinking that the first had been a fluke, but she moved cautiously, and Keith managed to force her back, chasing her where his feet led him--and straight into another of Matt's mines. She was listing this time when she retreated to the catwalk, staring down at them with malice in her eyes as her Galra shift began to slide. Pale skin, unnaturally waxen. Violet eyes stared down at him as her hand glowed briefly violet and the burns visible as bubbling, blackened flesh beneath her tattered robes smoothed over.

She rained lightning down on them, but Keith caught it on his sword as Akira scooped Matt up and deposited him in the shadow of the dais, out of the line of fire. Akira turned and charged, and a burst from the jets at his heels carried him up through the catwalk grating, where he threw Haggar backwards into yet another bomb.

She howled in fury and in pain, but she didn't bother to teleport away. Skin charred and sloughing away, robes in shreds, eyes sunken into a face that, for the first time, looked nearly as old as she really was, Haggar stretched her hands out to either side.

The very air stood still as Haggar seized hold of... everything. She seemed to be squeezing Keith's heart in her hands, forcing the air from his lungs. Hers was an old magic, twisted. She'd had ten thousand years to perfect her art, and there was no telling what she'd taught herself to do. She could control a mind, rip it apart and stitch it back together.

Who was to say she couldn't kill them all with a thought, too?

It would cost her; he knew that much. There was a reason she hadn't gone down this road before, and there was a finality in her eyes, in the tilt of her chin. She knew she'd lost.

But she refused to go down alone.

_**No.** _

Red's voice rang clear in the air, nevermind the preternatural silence that hung over the throne room. Even Akira gave a start at the sound of it, his spine straightening, dark eyes going wide. He mouthed Red's name, and she purred, filling Keith with warmth and affection.

_**Don’t worry. It will be different this time.** _

His mind chased the tails of hers as she slipped away, and an echo of her thoughts stretched back to him. All the darkness, all the pain. Ten thousand years with this woman, and she'd never figured out how to end it.

She had learned something, though.

The tattered ends of the bond hung in the air, a gossamer remnant of a time long past. Ghosts and shadows that led Red back to Keturah, always, and Keturah back to Red. They'd been enough, once, for Keturah to reach inside Red and pull.

They would be enough to return the favor.

Akira staggered, the breath going out of him, and Red was everywhere in that moment, tying them all together, and Keith could feel her pushing Akira away. Not down, though, but up, as she plunged into the depth of the Heart, past the lava field and the mist into a realm of pure fire: life, energy, destruction.

A sudden cold overtook Keith, stark in its contrast to the fire. It was the cold of space, a raging emptiness and a crushing solitude like nothing he'd ever felt before. It was so cold the bonfire of Red's passing barely touched him, a blaze that raced outward along the bond, turning it to ash and catching on the very air as every one of Matt's mines detonated at once, converging on the crimson ribbon that shot like an arrow toward Keturah's heart.

The flame descended in a column, divine retribution that left nothing but a charred and twisted corpse and the ashes of a burned-out bond in its wake.

And cold.

Just... _cold._

* * *

Pidge found a paradox on the edge of death. Their father had his hands around their neck, cutting off their air. Their lungs were burning, their limbs growing heavy as they tried, and failed, to pry his hands away. Everything grew slower, and softer, and darker.

Their mind, meanwhile, raced ahead, as though trying to cram a lifetime into the moments they had left.

They'd disabled the master key devices.

They'd freed Rax and Rolo and even Zuza.

But not Sam.

Sam was still a prisoner. Still an enemy.

But he'd fallen--a feint? Was the programming advanced enough to think of that on the fly?

Or had he been freed with the others, and only then put back under the druids' control?

Not the druids'.

Keena was here.

Keena _had been_ here _._

She'd been looking at the master key devices--at all of it, really. Rolo and Rax's reports seemed to indicate she was looking at everything all at once, like she was searching for an opening. Looking for a chance at revenge.

She'd found it.

She'd put a secondary layer of control into place, or had someone do it for her.

She couldn't have used the same controller, though; Pidge had cracked the biometrics database, and Keena didn't have a profile.

They didn't think she did.

They would have _noticed_  if she had.

But it took time to ward a device against technopathy. It was _expensive._ In this entire lab, the only things warded against their father and the other prisoners were the master key controller and the lions themselves. If Keena had created something portable, it should have been vulnerable.

Unless...

They took a breath so deep it burned, and only afterwards realized the hands were gone. A figure in yellow armor wrestled with one in green, and for long seconds, darkness dancing across their vision, Pidge wondered when Shay had gotten here.

"Keena!" Karen roared, scooping Pidge up and backing away from Sam and Rax. "Where the _fuck_  are you?"

Keena only laughed. "Does it matter? _I'm_ not the one who's trying to kill your kid."

As if on cue, Sam broke away from Rax and charged again. Karen planted herself between them and threw Sam over her shoulder. He hit the ground and bounced, rolled, as Karen spun toward Pidge, an almost graceful action, mesmerizing...

That was probably the wooziness talking.

They'd fallen again without Karen there to support them, and they gained their feet just as Karen reached them, their brain finally catching up to them. "We have to find her."

Karen placed a hand on their chest, guiding them backward away from Sam. "I know."

"You don't get it--" Pidge stopped themself. Keena had wormed her way into this call, and they didn't want to give away that they'd figured out her trick. There was more than one way to take control of a mind. Haggar had done it before, and without all this coding.

The computer's screens flashed, bright white and pitch black, so rapidly it made them dizzy, but only until they caught the pattern. Morse code.

_Dad._

They turned without a word and burst from the room, turning left, per Sam's instructions. Karen and Val both cried out at the sudden departure, but Pidge didn't slow, didn't stop to explain. Sam was in the flickering lights, in the doors that locked and unlocked before them. A hand on the wall and the headset in their helmet let them skim across the surface of the lab's electronics, where they felt the current of Sam's passing, leading them onward. To Keena.

Two sets of footsteps chased them. A glance over their shoulder showed both their parents, Sam armed once more with the bayard, Karen head down and sprinting after her family.

A laser clipped Pidge's shoulder, and they ran on. A cord looped around their ankle, but Karen slammed Sam against the wall and Pidge wriggled free. They couldn’t stop. They didn’t dare. Keena would have to be close to control Sam through Quintessence, but more importantly, she would want to see what was happening. She would want to relish her revenge.

They knew they were close when Sam put on a sudden burst of speed and slammed them against a wall, but as he bore them to the ground, Karen caught up, tackling Sam, tumbling with him, a tangle of limbs. Sam's gun skidded away; Karen had hers holstered at her back.

The door beside them slid open, and Pidge fired their bayard into the darkness without bothering to aim. They were rewarded with a cry, and they retracted the cord, lighting it up at the same time.

They should have known Keena wouldn't go down to a little bit of electricity. Screaming, she charged out into the hallway, yanking on the bayard's tether at the same time, yanking Pidge off balance. She brought her knee up, meeting Pidge's gut, knocking the wind from their lungs. They lost their grip on their bayard, and she tossed it away, but Pidge just summoned it again, their head spinning, their hands shaking. All they had to do was kill her. Just kill her, and it would be over.

Keena shoved them back, and Sam was ready, flipping them over, pinning them to the ground. Their bayard was trapped between them, the other hand pinned above their head, and Sam had his gun again. He pressed it to Pidge's temple.

"You don't get to win this time, Karen," Keena spat. "Pidge or Sam--your choice. Kill him, or stand aside. I’ll give the survivor back to you either way."

"Bitch," Karen hissed. She sounded winded, in pain. Pidge could only just see her over Sam's shoulder, struggling to her feet, clutching her ribs. Her other hand went behind her, to her gun.

Keena shrugged, crossing her arms and leaning back against the wall. She was smiling, all cool and confident. Fully, infuriatingly sure in her victory. "Maybe. What are you going to do about it? Kill me?” She laughed. “Then you'll lose them both."

"Mom," Pidge croaked, Sam’s weight squeezing the air from their lungs. There was so much they wanted to say. _Mom, she's lying._ _She’s the one inside his head. Just kill her_ _._ _Kill her, and it’s over._

"I know," Karen said, and fired three shots into Keena's face.

She dropped, her final look of shock frozen on her face, and Sam collapsed atop Pidge. They wheezed, wiggling toward freedom as the gun at their temple and the hand on their wrist both went slack.

Karen’s gun hit the ground with a clatter, and she hauled Sam off Pidge, gathering him in her lap and then trying to do the same to Pidge. Shaking, panting for air, every inch of them drenched in sweat, they burrowed into the embrace, winding their arms tight around Karen’s waist.

Sam’s eyes flew open. He lurched upright, swayed, pressed a hand to his head.

“Pidge,” he whispered. Then again, tears choking his voice: “Pidge, I’m so sorry--”

Pidge tore themselves away from their mother and flung themself at him, a pressure on their chest and a clamp around their throat that kept them from answering in anything but an incoherent sob. Sam flinched away from them, then froze, and as they clung to him, he slowly rested a hand on the back of their head.

“Sam.”

Karen sounded nothing like Pidge had ever heard her, breathless and flustered. She scrabbled at her helmet’s catch, ripping it off with no thought to the recently depressurized base. The pressure was still low, but evidently not low enough to matter; Sam had his helmet off in a moment, one hand around Pidge, the other out to catch Karen as she grabbed his face and pulled him into a kiss.

Pidge turned their head into their father’s shoulder and smiled, tears fogging the inside of their helmet, squeezed between their parents. The kiss lasted only a moment, Karen breaking away with a tearful laugh as she flung her arms around Sam’s neck.

“You’re okay,” she whispered. “Oh, thank god you’re okay.”

Pidge wheezed dramatically, but didn’t let Karen retreat too far. “Mom.” They glanced to where Keena lay, two dark holes burned through her forehead and another through one eye, the other eye staring sightlessly at the ceiling. "How'd you figure it out?"

Karen smiled, already shaking her head. "I didn't," she said. " _You_ did. I'm just your adjunct."

* * *

The battle was over.

That's what people kept telling him, anyway. Lance stood in the middle of a holomap of the battlefield, watching as half the army set about shepherding the eight surrendered warships away from the wreckage and began the slow process of unloading crews. They were do be divvied up among the castle-ship, the _Hope of Kera_ , Mirek's repurposed Imperial warship, the _Defender_ , and two of the bigger ships from New Altea.

The rest of the fleet circled back to the few remaining ships on the other side of the battlefield who had refused to surrender. A couple Princes, all but dead in the water. The _Eryth_ , still spoiling for a fight but defanged without the druids to maintain a deadly perimeter. The _Emperor's Pride,_  which remained as quiet as it had throughout the battle.

Lance made sure the fleet knew not to destroy the _Pride_  until Keith, Matt, and Akira were accounted for.

"You haven't heard from them?" Meri asked.

Lance worried his chapped lip, teeth catching on a bit of skin and tugging at it. "I was hoping you had."

"If they caught Keturah in the throne room, it could be shielded," Meri suggested. "It's gotta be one of the most secure rooms in the entire Empire."

That was entirely possible. Lance tried to call them again anyway, and cursed when he got no response. Now that there was nothing for him to do, the adrenaline was fizzling out, but not without coursing through him one last time, setting restless fingers drumming on his thigh, toes tapping against the ground.

"Why don't you guys go ahead and pull it in?" Lance said. "Hunk and Shay are on their way back already."

God bless Hunk and Shay, actually. They'd called in ten minutes ago with the good news--so not only did Lance get to tell the Coalition, but he didn't have to guess whether or not they were alive.

The tears hit him out of the blue, a sudden, delayed response to everything that had happened today. His neck was sore, his feet throbbing, his throat dry from a never-ending stream of orders. If someone had told him he'd been here for two days, he would have taken them at their word.

And they'd done it.

Zarkon's fleet was in shambles. The druids had been decimated. The Vkullor was dead.

Lance tugged his helmet off and pinched his eyes, trying to breathe through the emotion. _Really?_ he thought at himself. _You're gonna cry_ now? He couldn't even put a name to it all, couldn't say whether these were happy tears, or scared tears, or tears for the pilots he'd lost.

He was just tired, and overwhelmed, and flat-out _done_.

Coran touched his shoulder, a warm smile lighting his own misty eyes. "You were amazing," he whispered, wrapping his arms around Lance.

Laughing, Lance dropped his head onto Coran's shoulders. "Yeah, well, I learned from the best."

"Why don't you get out of here?" Coran pulled back to jerk his head toward the door. "I can deal with the cleanup."

"You sure?"

Coran only jerked his head again, and Lance squeezed his hand before slipping out. Away from the chatter, away from the low lights and bright holograms, away from the life-and-death decisions and the tally of what he'd saved versus what he'd lost, it was easier to breathe. The castle was bright and quiet as always, a hint of celebration glimpsed now and again, the rhythm of normal life plugging away. There were people in one of the dining halls, though most of them seemed to be eating plain goo.

Life went on.

Lance took the elevator down to the main hangar without thinking about it, the tug of Blue and her pilots stronger than his overtired mind. They'd already landed by the time he arrived, and the tears he'd almost gotten rid of rose to the surface again.

With a cry, he took off across the hangar floor, throwing himself at Meri and Nyma and noting with some satisfaction that Meri was tearing up, too--though that didn't stop her from jabbing her finger into Lance's ribs with a devilish grin that helped fill out the hollows of her cheeks and lighten the bloody drip of her weeping _glaes._

"Hey, there, _Admiral,_ " she said. "Way to step up your game."

He groaned, face flaming, but the only revenge he was capable of right now was to let his full dead weight fall on her.

She was kind enough not to let him drop.

Even Nyma couldn't hide her grin, though her eyes kept darting to the open hangar door, her arms crossed tight over her chest.

The Yellow Lion's arrival preempted whatever effort Lance might have made to tell Nyma it would be okay, and another wave of tears turned the greetings into something far less intelligible. Lance let Hunk make the rounds, and gave Shay a critical once-over before kissing her cheek and letting her continue on. But once those formalities were over, Lance latched onto Hunk and refused to let go.

The simple act of _being_  hadn't felt this miraculous since they were seventeen and terrified of every sound in a big, alien castle too cold to ever feel like home.

Lance had long since discarded his helmet, so he didn't hear Coran call with news that Green was on her way, but the reaction told him everything he needed to know. Shay clutched her hands at her throat, and Nyma blinked furiously to keep the tears at bay, and the both of them hardly waited for Green to set down before they were charging toward the lowering ramp.

Rax carried Rolo, clutching him protectively and shying away from Nyma's charge--though he did still when he caught sight of Shay. The catch and swell of their song even made Lance choke up; Hunk was downright keening, and clutching Lance like a teddy bear.

It was a frantic, flustered reunion, a medical team with hovering stretchers jogging into the hangar about the same time the others finally emerged from the lion. Val was guiding Zuza with an arm around her shoulders, brow furrowed as Zuza's eyes darted frantically around the space. She flinched back from every sound, and Val had to repeat herself twice when she tried to prod Zuza toward the nearest stretcher.

The Holts moved in a tight knot, Karen carrying Sam, Pidge hovering so close Lance was surprise no one was tripping over anyone else. Lance finally pulled himself away from Hunk to go meet them, pulling Pidge into a hug as the medic tried to convince Karen to put her husband down.

"I'll be fine, Karen," he said with a smile. "I'm not going anywhere."

In short order, all four former prisoners were settled on stretchers and on their way to the infirmary, family and friends clustered around. Lance held Zuza's hand as they walked, but doing so kept him just a few paces from the Holts, and Pidge turned toward him.

"What'd we miss? I'm guessing it's over, if you're all here."

"Most of it is," Lance said. "Hunk and Shay took down the Vkullor, and we took care of the fleet. Still waiting to hear back from the Reds and Blacks."

"Dad talked to Shiro on the way back," Pidge said. "Zarkon's dead, but sounds like Shiro and Allura had a little bit of a hike to get back to Black."

Lance let out a shaky breath. "That's one less thing to worry about. No word from Matt or Keith, though?"

Pidge shook their head, and Lance bit his lip. There was nothing to worry about yet. He'd give them a couple more minutes. Long enough to get Zuza and everyone else settled in their pods.

 _Then_ he'd let himself contemplate what he hoped was an unnecessary rescue mission.

* * *

The walk back to the Red Lion was a quiet one. Matt couldn't support his own weight, and Keith and Akira were both too bone-tired to carry him, so they had to support him between them, hobbling along deserted corridors and fading into shadows whenever they spotted motion up ahead.

Matt's face remained screwed up the entire way, his jaw clenched, his breath a ragged gasp when he managed to breathe at all. He looked like he was in a lot of pain.

Not that Keith could tell, anymore.

Red was gone, the paladin bond with her. Keith didn't know what that meant, or whether it was permanent, and Akira's stony-faced silence wasn't giving anything away. Matt had been the one to get them moving, and Keith had to keep an eye out for enemies. Akira hardly seemed aware of his surroundings, and the only reason Keith wasn't worried--yet--was that whenever Keith stared at him for more than a second or two, Akira invariably caught him looking and offered a smile. Weak and sad, yes, but it was something.

They followed Akira's trail of destruction back to the ship's hull. It was a shorter path than the one Keith and Matt had taken, and it required backtracking or hiding out only a couple of times. The entire ship was eerily empty--and, sure, all three of them had plowed through a good amount of resistance on their way in, but there should have been _some_  crew left.

Maybe they'd all run. Keith had seen a plethora of proof today that the upper echelons of the Empire tolerated cowardice in themselves far better than they tolerated it among the ranks of enlisted soldiers.

Frankly, he was just glad they made it back to Red without any trouble. Keith and Akira lowered Matt into his chair, where he sat with one hand clawing at his bad leg, just above the knee, his head pressing back into his seat. Keith hovered there, unsure what to do, but when he turned to Akira for help, he found that Akira had already slumped to the floor on the other side of Matt's chair, his head bowed atop his knees.

Throat tight, Keith slipped into his own chair and hesitantly put his hands on the controls. He felt... nothing. No connection to Matt or Akira, no rumble of a lion in his chest. The engines remained cold, the screens around him dark. Only the basic diagnostics came up when he tried to figure out what was wrong.

He knew what was wrong already; he just didn't want to admit it.

He opened his mouth again, uncertainty making him hesitate. He wanted Matt or Akira to tell him how to fix it, but he knew without asking that neither of them was going to be any help at the moment. Matt was hurt, and Akira...

Akira had lost more than either of them, Keith thought.

The comms still worked. That was one little bit of good news. Keith switched them on and selected the paladins' frequencies from the list--he had to do it manually, for once. Took him too long to realize it, too, but after sitting in silence for a good thirty seconds, he realized his mistake.

"Hey, uh--" Keith's voice cracked, and he swallowed, uncomfortably aware of the silence around him and fighting the urge to whisper. "Hey, guys?"

"Keith! Oh, thank the ancients." Allura's voice was bright and sharp, dripping with relief, but too happy for the mood inside the cockpit. Keith flinched away from it, his ears twitching inside his helmet. "It's Keith," Allura added, presumably to someone else in the room. Several someones, if the chatter in the background was any indication.

They came on the comms one by one--Lance and Hunk and Pidge and then half the team at once, calling Keith's name, crying out in joy and in fear.

Keith doubled over, his helmet coming to rest against the console with a _thunk._  "We're all here," he said, because he kept hearing Matt and Akira's names through the cacophony. "Matt busted his knee, but we're all here. But..." Tears pressed at the back of his eyes, and for a long moment he forgot how to speak. "Something happened to Red. I think she's..."

"Keith," Karen said--too kind, too soft, and so sad he knew she already knew what had happened.

"We're gonna need someone to come and get us."

* * *

Karen waited breathlessly in the hangar as Black and Green towed Red in. Val and Allura had volunteered to go get Keith, Matt, and Akira so the others didn't have to leave their loved ones in the infirmary, for which Karen was immensely grateful. Zuza had had a panic attack from the flurry of activity, the medics couldn't get Shay and Rax to let go of each other long enough to prep him for the pod, and Sam eyed the pod with so much disgust Karen wished her adjunct bond could tell her everything he'd suffered while he was away.

Rolo had it the worst of them, though--a poorly attached cybernetic leg, now mostly detached, definitely infected, though the doctors kept remarking how lucky he was that the infection hadn't spread. They warned him they might not be able to save the leg, which only made Rolo laugh.

"I don't give a shit about that piece of _skiv_. Chop it off and be done with it."

"Are you sure?"

Rolo gave the man a dark look and jerked his chin at the waiting cryopod. "I'm not going in that thing twice."

They were all settled in now, even Rax and Zuza, whose injuries were minor and mainly needed rest and some real food. There were still the master key implants to deal with, and everyone wanted those taken care of as soon as possible, just in case. The files Pidge had copied from the lab had schematics, and the medical staff was confident they'd be able to remove the implants safely, given a few days to study them and the pods to help with the delicate work.

Karen hated to be away from Sam's side, even if _at his side_ meant sitting outside a metal tube that gave her a hazy view of his face at best. If it wasn't Matt and Keith in that lion, she wasn't sure she'd have been able to drag herself away.

But her sons were hurting, and scared--the only thing that had been worse than the sudden cold rush of knowledge had been how small and lost Keith sounded on the comms.

The lions set down, the hangar door at last sealing behind them, shutting out the stars and the war and its aftereffects. Keith and Akira appeared at the top of Red's ramp, supporting Matt in between them, and Karen's heart twisted at the sight of them, all three beaten down and weary, grief etched into their faces. The Red Lion remained lifeless where Black and Green had set her.

Matt's face brightened at the sight of Karen and Pidge, and he hobbled a little faster down the ramp, Keith and Akira scrambling to keep him upright. "You're back," he said. "Did you--?"

"We got him." Karen took Matt's face in her hands. "He's in a cryopod right now, but he's going to be all right. They all are." He began to tear up, and Karen took his weight from Akira, letting Matt cry into her shoulder while Shiro flung his arms around his brother. Karen turned to Keith, words failing her as she cupped her hand around his neck and ran a thumb across his cheek, wicking away a tear.

"What?" he asked.

Karen took a breath. "Keena's dead."

Keith's eyes widened. "She was there?"

"One last scheme to try to take Sam from us," Karen said dismissively. "It's not important. What matters is that she can't hurt you anymore."

Keith relaxed, one breath at a time, and then he finally smiled and melted against her. "I'm just glad she didn't hurt you."

Karen stood there holding her sons, Pidge wedging themself into the huddle, until Matt began to waver on his feet. She pulled back then, waving over the medic who'd come prepared with a stretcher.

"Wait," Matt said, pushing back from Karen. He spun, hopping on one foot, and lunged at Shiro. He brought his bad leg down for balance and winced. "Fuck, ow. Shiro--"

"Matt, why don't you sit down?"

"This is important."

"Too important to sit?" Shiro asked dryly.

Matt wrinkled his nose. " _Yes._ Now, shush. It's hard enough to do this when my leg feels like I fed it to an alligator, okay? Shiro."

"Yes."

" _Takashi._ "

" _Yes,_  Matt."

Matt hooked his fingers around the edges of Shiro's breastplate and tugged him closer, though Shiro was already supporting most of Matt's weight and effort was mostly wasted. "I promised I'd ask you something after we won the war." He paused, pulled back, cursed again as he wobbled and put his foot down. "We did win, right? Haggar's dead--"

"Zarkon, too, Matt, yes."

Matt nodded. "Good. Then I need to ask you--"

" _Matt,_ " Shiro said with a laugh. "How many times do I need to say yes?"

Matt stopped with his mouth still open, surprise slowly morphing into a teary-eyed joy, and he pulled Shiro down into a kiss.

"Uh, sorry," Lance said from somewhere behind Karen. "I might have missed something, but did he just--are they--?"

Keith was smiling now, the grief relegated to the bags beneath his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "Matt promised he'd propose after the war."

Karen had shed more tears today than she had possibly ever, but she found she had still more, and she hugged them both as her heart soared. "I can't wait until your father finds out," she said--a bit hysterically? Perhaps. She didn't care, and neither did anyone else. The whole team crowded in to congratulate Matt and Shiro, who beamed and laughed and couldn't stop crying any more than Karen could.

They deserved it.

But Matt was still injured, and he kept jostling his leg, shouting and cursing and adamantly refusing to be reasonable until Nyma took the stretcher from the antsy medic waiting nearby, parked it behind Matt, and wrestled him down onto it.

"For fuck's sake," she muttered. "Stop being an idiot."

Matt only laughed, though he sobered as he looked down at his knee. "Fine," he said. "But no pod."

"Matt," Karen began.

"I'm serious. The pods are great and all, and they get you back on your feet in a flash, but it's not that simple with me, and this isn't going to kill me." He scrubbed at a dried smear of blood, flaking it off his armor so he didn't have to look at the faces around him. "Besides, it's not like there's any rush, right? I know there's still a lot to do, and the war's not totally done, but...I _am._ "

Karen pulled his hand away from his leg and squeezed it, searching for something to say.

Perhaps Matt took her silence as an argument, because he looked up at her then, a touch of desperation in his gaze. "I did what I needed to do. We have Dad back, Zarkon and Haggar are dead--"

"You've done more than enough, Matt," Allura said from the foot of the stretcher, placing her hand on his good leg just above the ankle. "I have always said that any of you could leave at any time, and I stand by that still. You're right that there's still work to be done, but Voltron's time is coming to an end." She raised her head, looking around the circle. "I won't send any of you away, but the work you would do if you remain will be different. Smaller battles, and hopefully fewer. More diplomacy. The Imperial military is a fragment of what it was, and what is left to disassemble is the bureaucracy. No one expects you to continue the fight.

"Think about it," she said. "You don't need to have an answer for me today."

* * *

Matt's announcement was a watershed moment for the team. That very night, once Matt had been in and out of surgery to fix a torn ligament in his knee, while he was resting in the infirmary, still a little lethargic, Pidge announced that they were going home, too.

"Val and I talked," they explained, glancing up at Allura, who'd come to see how Matt was doing. "She's taking a break, all the Mendozas are, but then she wants to stay with Nyma and Rolo, and they want to finish what they started. I'm not done, either." They leaned into their mother's side, staring at the corner of Matt's blanket that hung crooked off his bed. "I want to come back to it eventually--maybe not to the fighting, but to the castle. To the Coalition. I'm thinking about grad school on Olkarion."

Matt smiled at them, his eyelids drooping. "Ph.D. in the Arts?"

Pidge sniffled, and shrugged. "Maybe. I haven't decided. But I know I didn't go through all this not to at least have a few years at home first."

Hunk and Shay were staying on the castle, for now. Long enough to finish liberating the Balmera, which the Guard had already declared as their top priority, and which Allura was petitioning the Coalition as a whole to throw their support behind. After that, they weren't sure. To Earth, or to the Migration, or maybe splitting their time between them both. They made a point of saying they would stay on call, in case something came up, in case the universe needed the Yellow Lion.

Allura didn't think it would, and she wan't worried in any case. If anything truly dire ever came up, she knew the trouble would be keeping her paladins _away_ , rather than getting them to return.

She appreciated the thought all the same.

Keith was one of the few who _didn't_  know where he was going--though that might have been news to the rest of the Holts, who talked and planned as though it were a given that he would be returning home with them, at least in the short term.

"I guess there's no reason _not_  to," he admitted to Allura over breakfast a few days later. She'd commented on how he seemed to be sleeping poorly--a gentle prod, but one that had utterly demolished his reservations. "It's _weird_  to think that they want me there, but that's not _their_ fault."

"Do you not _want_  to live with them?" Allura asked.

"Of course I do!" Keith flattened his ears and hunched over his pancakes--courtesy of the Kahales, who were all brighter and cheerier after three days of no battle. "I _do_... I just... I don't know."

"It's hard to step away," Allura guessed. "Growing up in the Empire and then joining us as a paladin... How long has it been since you _weren't_  fighting a war, or training for one?"

Keith's shoulder jerked once. He pushed his food around his plate. "I think I _want_  to go. It just feels like I'm running away."

She squeezed his hand. "You're not. Not at _all_." She paused. "If it helps you justify it to yourself, you might as well go with Akira."

He snorted a laugh, and she was glad to hear it. The subject of Red was still a sensitive one for them all. The Red Lion had showed no signs of life, with or without Akira inside it, since the last battle. Allura privately feared the worst, but Akira insisted she wasn't dead. _If she was, I would be too. We tied ourselves together too much for anything else._

He couldn't give a solid answer for where she _was_ , if she wasn't dead, or what had happened, or whether she would ever return, but he remained stubbornly optimistic. She was lost, he said, like Akira himself had been at the start, and he'd vowed to find her and help bring her back.

Until he managed that, however, there was no Red Lion, which meant there was no real use for a red paladin. Not that Keith couldn't have taken up the helm of a Guard ship or ridden along with one of the others.

But in the end, all he really needed was to justify leaving to himself, and with Akira planting himself firmly back on Earth at least until the wedding, Keith had all the justification he needed.

* * *

The first few days after the battle passed in a haze. Akira spent as much time in the Heart as out of it, searching for signs of Red. The fact that the Heart still existed at all, and that he could get to it, he counted as proof--even if it was cold and dark, gray mist hanging low over black rock without a ribbon of fresh lava in sight. It was dormant, like a slumbering volcano, but it was still here.

He stood by what he’d said before, at any rate. As long as he was alive, Red was, too. They'd only ever considered the reverse, because it made Akira Voltron's weakness, but it went both ways.

That _felt_  true, in a way he couldn't describe to the rest of the team.

Keith and Matt believed him.

He thought they did. It was strange not to be able to sense them as he'd begun to do--but that sense had always come from Red, and with her gone, and the bond dormant...

It was lonely, without Red in the back of his mind. He never would have expected that. Maybe that was why he kept returning to the Heart, following whispers on a wind in search of the other half of himself.

But he couldn't let the search for Red take up every moment of his life. He would find her, but shutting everyone else out wouldn't necessarily make the process any faster. And he was done hiding his head in the sand.

"Something's been bothering you," Takashi said, leaning against him on the couch. It was late, and neither one of them had changed out of sweats all day--an incredible luxury, all things considered. Akira had found Takashi that afternoon, and they'd settled in for movies and junk food without Akira even needing to suggest it.

Takashi looked at him now, gaze sharp and critical and finally tired of waiting for Akira to spill the beans.

"It's not about Red, is it?"

"It is, actually." Akira stretched his arms over his head, fixing his gaze on the screen. "But not about her disappearing, no."

Takashi tipped his head to the side. "You were acting weird at the start of the battle. Just after we'd brought down Dark Voltron, when Allura and I were leaving to chase Zarkon."

Akira felt the familiar burn that warned of tears, an all too familiar sensation these days. Swallowing, he nodded. "It just hit me that I could lose you. That I'd been wasting time worrying about the future instead of enjoying the present."

"Okay..." Takashi frowned. "What does that have to do with Red?"

Akira hadn't spoken about it to anyone since his conversation with the Alteans--not even to Matt or Keith. They probably suspected something, enough that they wouldn't be too surprised when he confessed the truth, but he doubted they'd come up with the whole answer on their own.

"Merging with Red... It changed me. Physiologically." Akira shrugged. "It's got something to do with Quintessence, and I don't really understand how it works. But I've seen the effects. I'm faster than I used to be. Stronger. Coran says I heal quicker, though I can't say I've noticed. I'm also aging slower."

Takashi turned. "How much slower?"

Akira shook his head. "No one really knows. Not like there's another case we can compare me to. I'll probably outlive most of the team, maybe even Coran. A couple hundred years, give or take."

Takashi released a breath like Akira's words had punctured him, but he didn't break down screaming or vowing to fix it, which was better than Akira had dared to hope. "How are you doing?"

"A little freaked out, if I'm honest." Akira smiled feebly. "I'm not sure I want to live that long. But it's getting better. Scary, but the same way death is always scary. I thought I lost you three years ago, but I got through it, and I got you back. I could have lost you three _days_  ago, but I didn't. There was never any guarantee I'd go first--and technically, I could still die young. Who knows. Maybe my next job will be as a stunt man and there will be a horrible accident on set one day."

Scowling, Takashi elbowed him in the ribs, and Akira wheezed out a laugh.

"I'm just saying. It's terrifying, I'm not going to lie. But it doesn't have to stop me living my life."

Takashi settled in again, half laying on Akira, half propped up against the back of the couch. "Since when are you the well-adjusted one?"

"Since you went and dragged us both into a millennia-old war that almost got us and all our friends killed on multiple occasions?"

"But it didn't," Takashi said.

Akira smiled, his head falling back against the pillow. "No, it didn't."

* * *

Even after all the fighting, there was still an Empire to dismantle. Coran kept the paladins out of it as much as he could--this was a matter for the politicians who wanted to rule themselves, and even if Coran hadn't had the private desire to keep Allura and all the rest of them out of the fracas, she had previously and repeatedly voiced her desire to _not_  allow Voltron to cross the line her father had danced upon during his tenure as king.

They were protectors, not rulers, and certainly not a replacement for the dictator they had just toppled.

And for the most part, Coran was able to handle the Coalition's requests himself. With Thace always close at hand to help out, it could almost be considered easy work, with games of _eshet_  that were friendly in a 'bitter rivals' sort of way. (The only thing better than Thace's smile when he won was the way he pursed his lips and scoured the board for the seeds of his defeat when he lost.)

The Coalition occasionally needed help dealing with another remnant of Zarkon's fleet they'd found holed up around one colony or another. The castle had gone, and the Guard had flown point, but so far the lions themselves had not been needed.

More than anything, they needed information. Zarkon had entrenched his Empire on thousands of worlds, through occupation, colonization, brutally lopsided alliances--farces, more often than not--and outright threats. The castle had long been, and still was, the primary target for aid requests and distress calls, and the paladins had been compiling information about the Empire for years. The Accords' old files were invaluable in that regard, but the castle's archives weren't far behind.

It was easy work, for now. No one wanted more fighting--not the Coalition, which was still licking its wounds; not the occupied worlds, who couldn't defend themselves; and not the Imperial governments that suddenly found themselves lacking the external support that made their rule so terrifyingly effective.

The Coalition had lost a number of important leaders in the battle, but they were rebuilding, and had already opened talks with dozens of worlds.

The primary sticking point, and the one Allura inserted herself into without Coran noticing or being able to stop her, was the matter of the Galra themselves.

They needed somewhere to go--the homeworld Galra, the ones who had surrendered themselves, the ones who voluntarily withdrew from occupied worlds. There was some resistance to the idea within the Coalition, but the majority of delegates agreed that they didn't want to punish the ones who chose peace. All that would do was spur the rest to dig in their heels and fight to the bitter end.

Acknowledging that the Galra needed a home, however, was not the same as opening their own borders.

A few worlds answered the call for refuge, in limited numbers. New Altea could take some. Olkarion would accept refugees from the homeworld, but none who had been in the military or occupying governments. Earth was still in deliberation, but Coran was hopeful.

It wasn't enough, not nearly. Frankly, it never would be. Not only did Coran understand the distrust of worlds who had only shrugged off Imperial rule within the last two years, but the Galra themselves needed more than temporary homes and communities kept deliberately small.

They needed a _home._

Unfortunately, habitable, unoccupied worlds were no easier to come by now than they had been ten thousand years ago. There were a few colonies the Empire had set up because of natural resources, rather than to dominate a people--mostly small worlds with harsh climates. Terraformed enclosures and self-sustaining complexes. Not enough for a fraction of the Galra people, even if Coran could have conscienced breaking them up into small, isolated groups.

The greatest rehabilitation the Galra people could find was to reintegrate military and political actors into the culture of the homeworld--a strong, sympathetic group that wanted peace and self-determination above all--and to give them no ready excuse for a grudge.

It was Allura who found a solution, Allura who led an expedition to old Altea and its neighboring planets and determined that the scars of a long-ago war had not, in fact, rendered them inhospitable.

It was Allura who brought the notion before the people of New Altea, drafting an impassioned speech for the Senate that was broadcast to the entire planet.

"Altea of old closed itself off from the universe," she said. "We sent envoys to the stars, but we kept other people out. We built an Alliance of worlds that depended on us, _deferred_ to us--and then we let them down.

"New Altea exists because of the kindness of the Galra. Brave individuals who defied Zarkon's ambition, risked their lives to save my people and bring them here. They sheltered us, helped us to rebuild, and we are stronger for it. But now it is time to repay our debts. My mother would have welcomed these people with open arms. My father should have--if he had, perhaps it never would have come to war. We can only speculate. But for myself, for today, I choose to welcome them, to live alongside them and share with them.

"I am here today for your support before I bring this proposal to the Coaliton's general assembly: the restoration of Altea, the designation of the world as a refuge for all. For Galra, for Alteans, for all those who have lost their homes to this war and want to start over, to build something _together._

"This proposal is a chance to write a new story for our universe. To any of you who wish to help in the telling--Galra or Altean, _sothra_ or _asothra_ \--New Daibazaal is open to you."

Not everyone loved the idea, of course. Allura had people accuse her of surrendering to Zarkon, of letting the conquerors finally take Altea. She saw it differently, as did Coran and Meri--and as the only three in the universe who had ever known Altea of old, their opinions were enough to sway a great many people. The Coalition still had to vote on the proposition, but Coran was cautiously optimistic.

One week after the battle that ended the war, the Coalition made the ceasefire official, and the castle staff organized a belated celebratory feast. An hour into the festivities, Mirek pulled him aside and asked whether he thought it would be a good idea, if the New Daibazaal plan was approved, to name the first city after Lealle. Tired and overworked and already more emotional than he would have liked to admit, Coran very nearly broke down. The poor woman thought she'd said something wrong.

"Not at all," Coran said, accepting the handkerchief Thace offered him with as much grace as he could muster. "Lealle would be honored. Allura, too."

Mirek smiled, and clapped him on the back, then snagged herself a glass of nunvill from a passing tray. "To tomorrow!"

* * *

While most of the castle was celebrating the newfound peace in the castle's grand ballroom and dining hall, ten people gathered in the infirmary twenty floors above. It had taken a full week to analyze the master key devices and figure out how to remove them, but now, at last, there was progress.

Shay stood with her parents beside Rax's pod, her song running away from her as the two healers ran the final checks. The sliver of her mind that was not consumed with impatience felt sorry for the Holts, Shiro, and Nyma, who had another few days to wait--Rolo's infection was taking longer to clear than they had hoped, and they wanted to run additional tests on Sam to ensure Keena's meddling hadn't changed the master key implant in any way before they removed it.

But Rax and Zuza were finally ready to come out.

Lance had put in a special request for Zuza's adopted sister Azra to be brought along with the New Altean delegation. She stood now with Tev, another survivor of Revinor who had joined Coran's crew, bouncing on her toes. Shay remembered a scrawny child, all leg and hardly up to Shay's hip, but it had been a year and a half since Azra had left the castle-ship. She was eight now, taller and gangling, with dark patterns developing in her fine fuzz of fur. Lance had braided her hair while they waited, and she'd sat still through it all, though she had chattered on about her new pet and the things she'd learned in school.

Lance was here, too, standing with Hunk and Keith along the back wall. Keith did not surprise Shay, and she knew Hunk was here for her, but Lance normally enjoyed parties and the chance to dress up. He'd only smiled when she'd asked and said they were all going to be sick of parties by the time it was through.

She doubted that very much, but she was sure Zuza would be touched by his presence.

The healers gave the final okays, and Shay stepped forward as Rax's pod released in a hiss of steam. He fell into her arms, too thin, his skin dry and rough, his carapace pale and flaking. The Kahales were already preparing a quiet dinner for the lot of them, for which Shay was grateful.

Rax stiffened, and Zuza gave a cry of fear, jerking back and staring wildly around the room. Shay's heart broke for her as Keith and Lance stepped forward, Lance to soothe a startled Azra, Keith to help Tev orient Zuza. She had hardly seemed aware of herself when she had gone into the pod, confused and quiet and glassy-eyed.

She was better now, gathering Azra to her after just a moment, but wounds like those did not heal overnight.

Rax, thankfully, was more aware than that. He clung to Shay, shivering, but only until he saw their parents. His song was quiet and meandering, a year and more away from his people having taken its toll, but he sang their songs with perfect timing as he lunged for them, clinging like a youngling, curled up and burrowing.

Shay glanced at Hunk as Rax's song found the hole their Grandmother Mir had left when she died, and he pulled back in shock and sorrow.

"She would not want you to mourn," their mother said. "That we've found you again is all she would have asked."

Shay gathered him in her arms once more--a profoundly human gesture, meant for softer bodies than theirs, but Rax did not seem to mind--and she sang a soothing song.

"But--our family. The Elders--"

"Shay's an Elder now," Hunk said. "She helped free other Balmera. She found a Migration--"

" _We_  found a Migration," Shay corrected. "You will love it."

Rax glanced back and forth between Hunk and Shay, frowning, a question in his song that Hunk answered instinctively. Shay had to smile at the shock that silenced Rax's song.

"He is my heart-mate," Shay said, and could have cried when the surprise in Rax’s song turned not to resentment, but to fondness, and to gratitude. Hunk’s lip wobbled, just a little. "I wish you could have been there."

Rax's eyes shifted to her, and softened. "It seems I have missed a great deal."

"We can catch you up," she said. "But first--food."

* * *

Shiro breathed in the cool, clean air of the Heart, tilting his face back to catch the starlight twinkling overhead. Black was a distant, watchful presence--close enough for her purrs to rumble in his chest, but far enough to give him the quiet he needed to sort things through.

Perhaps sensing that an hour of quiet meditation had gotten him precisely nowhere, Allura joined him in the darkness, kneeling beside him in the water, her hands in her lap. He'd started out in the deep Heart, where they usually did their meditation, but had found himself wanting this view.

Perhaps that had been another warning sign to Allura.

"I don't know if I can walk away from this," he said without prompting. He opened his eyes, but kept his face toward the sky. Familiar constellations glittered all around him, stars that didn't exist anywhere else in the universe, a landscape only a select few would ever see.

"You don't have to," Allura said. "I said I wouldn't send anyone away, and I meant it." Shiro hesitated, and Allura smiled. "But you want to go."

"Part of me does," he admitted. "Part of me wants to get away from the fighting, and the politics. I'm _tired,_  Allura. I know you understand. The stress of it all... I'm just a pilot. I never wanted all this."

She was quiet for a moment, then asked, "But?" 

Shiro tore his eyes away from the stars and looked at her. She had her hair down today--down but not styled, loose waves cascading over her shoulders. That hadn't happened often lately; she wore her hair practical, or she wore it like a crown, a mark of authority she used to impress tentative allies. It made her look younger this way.

Smiling, Shiro leaned back on his hands, relishing the cool water that lapped at his wrists. " _But,_  I can't deny that what we do is rewarding. We save _lives_ , Allura. We've changed the fate of the entire universe--and there are still more people out there who need us. Do I have any right to turn my back on them? Could I ever be happy if I went back to being just a pilot?"

"It's okay not to know the answer to those questions right away," she said. "I was raised to be a leader, and even _I_ don't know if I want to do this for the rest of my life." She paused. "I don't know what I would do if I did decide to step away."

Shiro leaned his shoulder against hers, rocking her with the motion of the waves. They were both soaked through by now, her in silk trousers and a simple dress with split skirts, him still in his pajamas for the novelty of not having a reason to change. It should have been cold, but it was difficult to be uncomfortable in the Heart, especially with the knowledge that they would shed the water as soon as they left.

"There are a million things you could do," he told her, "and you'd be amazing at all of them."

"What will you do? If you leave?"

He frowned, letting his head loll back. "I'm not entirely sure. I used to want to teach at the Garrison after I retired from active duty. I don't know that I want anything to do with the Garrison these days, but... I don't know. I could open a flight school of my own, I suppose."

Allura laughed, the sound light and loose like nothing Shiro had heard from her in over a year. "You certainly wouldn't be hurting for students."

"I don't suppose so, no." Shiro shook his head. "But would it be enough? Or would it just remind me of what I could have had?"

Allura shifted beside him, reaching out her hand to cover his. "You want my advice? Don't decide just yet. Take a year away from it all. Go home, get married. Get a job at another flight school. If it's not enough, if you're not ready to retire, then come back. There will always be a place for you here, Shiro, in whatever capacity you want."

 _ **You will always be mine,**_  Black added, appearing from the darkness as a house cat and twining between her paladins. She curled around Shiro's arm, put her paws up on his lap. _**You are my paladin, and you could be my adjunct. I will not let go of you, not as long as you want me in return.**_

He smiled at her, running his fingers through her fur. "I'll always want you. Both of you," he added, looked up at Allura. "Whatever happens, you're both part of me. I couldn't turn my back on that."

Maybe that was part of it-- _whatever happens._  For the first time in a lifetime, the future was open to him. A flight school on Earth, a position in the Coalition's new government, a posting on the castle training Edi and supporting Allura in whatever she chose to do... The last three years had been a narrow road somebody else laid out before him. There had been moments of choice--a choice to take Matt's place in the Arena, a choice to trust Keith, to infiltrate and later betray the Imperial army--but in a way, each choice had locked him into the decision. There was no turning back from any of them. There was no 'wait and see,' 'give it a try.'

Maybe his problem was just that he had too many options.

"Think about it," Allura said, nodding as though it was already decided. "But more importantly, give yourself time to just _be,_  without worrying about what comes next."

He gave her a wry smile. "And you? I hope that advice isn't only for me."

She smiled, smug and secretive, like she'd just been waiting for him to ask. "As a matter of fact, Wyn's invited Coran, Meri, and myself to see the sights on New Altea. Don't look at me like that," she said, tossing her hair. "I'll be sticking around for a couple of weeks, just in case any disasters crop up immediately, but I know when to step away."

"Sure you do. Doesn't have anything at all to do with bullying Meri and Coran into a vacation. Wyn's a clever kid."

Allura's mouth dropped open in mock offense, and she skimmed her hand along the surface of the water, dousing him from head to toe. Black, of course, vanished before the first drop landed. Laughing, Shiro raised his hands to shield his face, and once Allura had turned away to pout, he flicked a handful of water at her back.

"Truce," he said quickly, hands held up in surrender, because she gave him a look that said she _would_  tackle him. "Just promise you'll come visit Earth when you're done on New Altea. I want to give you guys a proper tour."

She leaned on his shoulder, her smile soft and fond. “It’s a promise.”

* * *

Matt already hated the crutches.

There was always a hover-chair, and Matt opted for that a lot of the time, but he often found himself far too restless for so much sitting. He had a wedding to plan--to brainstorm, at least, since he couldn't very well research venues from space (which hadn't stopped him from trying; he'd found a lovely looking garden that did events on Olkarion, and Alayun had some stunning beaches.)

Mainly there was a lot of flailing and a constant need to shove his tablet in Shiro's face. Or his mother's. Or, all else failing, at Keith, who was confused but enthusiastic about the entire process.

Unfortunately, Alteans had made very few notable improvements on the concept of crutches, and Matt's knee was weeks away from swapping over to a cane or brace.

He found ways to keep busy.

A week and two days into his recovery, his mother showed up at his workroom door, Pidge practically vibrating in her shadow. "It's almost time," she said.

Matt glanced down at his project--just about done now, after pulling an all-nighter. Maybe not as polished as he'd have liked, but it would do. He slid it into its case and propelled his chair out into the hallway. A still groggy Keith followed after him. He'd kept Matt company last night, but had ended up curling up on another bench a few hours ago.

He roused quickly now, as the reality of the situation sank in.

"You ready to meet your new dad?" Matt asked, leaning to one side to pull his chair up close.

Keith flicked one ear, his steps faltering. "You say it like it's a done deal."

Matt grinned, Karen put an arm around Keith's shoulders, and Keith, somehow, looked more petrified than ever.

The infirmary was just the same as it had been, except for being two patients down. Matt had spent the first full day here, off his feet and resting, and he'd returned countless times since, with Pidge, with Karen, with Keith, with Shiro or Akira or Nyma. They all understood that it was comforting just to stand beside the frosted glass and watch his father breathe.

He looked so different--thinner and paler, with lines around his eyes and a furrow in his brow that made him look too old. It shouldn't have been surprising; _Matt_  hardly looked like the happy-go-lucky nerd who'd left Earth, and he'd only been in the druids' hands for a year.

There were still benches pulled in close to the pods, blankets and pillows scattered around, though most of the mess had been shoved to the side of the room. Nyma and Val were finishing up when the Holts arrived. Val was finishing up, mostly. Nyma kept stopping to stare at Rolo. They'd already turned his pod sideways in anticipation of his release, his freshly re-amputated leg visible through another window panel.

Matt set his case on one of the benches as Shiro ducked into the room. "Sorry I'm late."

Matt eyed him--sweat pants, tee shirt, mussed hair... He must have only just woken up. Matt would tease him about oversleeping except that it had taken him more than a week past the end of the war to get to this point. Matt didn't want to ruin it with sarcasm.

"You're fine, Shiro," Karen said, rising up on her toes to kiss his cheek. "We only just got here ourselves."

Shiro gave her a squeeze, then turned his gaze to Sam's pod. "I know I hardly have the right to say I missed him when I've had him inside my head for the last few months, but... I can't wait to see him."

Matt couldn't put into words how much he agreed. He'd spent the last week trying to remember what his dad's voice sounded like, but his memory was slippery at best. It always sounded like a stranger talking.

He accepted his crutches from his mother and levered himself up.

It was an interminable final thirty seconds, Coran bustling around with the medical staff, then finally bowing out as the pods began to hiss. Matt rocked forward on his crutches, then forced himself to stay put. Let the guy with the busted knee and exactly zero free hands try to catch the semi-conscious patient--yeah. That'd go _real_  well.

So he let his mom and Shiro step forward instead, Pidge darting around all three of them in a positive feedback loop of anxious energy. They grabbed onto Shiro's shoulders and jumped up to look over his head, then ducked around under Karen's elbow, then grabbed Matt's arm and shook until Karen dragged them away.

"You're going to pull him over," she said--but Pidge let out a shriek at that moment. The first hiss of vapor turned to a billowing cloud as the door slid back. Somewhere across the room, Beezer trilled a high and impressively teary-sounding whistle. Sam slumped forward into Karen's waiting arms, Shiro offering each of them a hand to keep them steady.

"Sam," she whispered.

His grip on her arms tightened, fingers digging into the sleeves of her sweater until Matt started to worry he was going to rip the fabric. It lasted only a moment before Sam gathered himself, pulled back, and lifted his head.

"This is real," he said in wonder. He pulled one hand from her arm to cup her cheek, fingers threading into her hair. "I was afraid I'd dreamed it all up."

Karen shook her head, blinked furiously, lifted her hand to cover Sam's. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds, and then she leaned in and kissed him.

Three years ago, Pidge would have groaned and gagged at the display-- _had_ done so for far more chaste kisses than this, as a matter of fact--but now they just bunched up the folds of Matt's hoodie in their hands and sniffled until he shifted his crutch enough to pull them against his side.

Matt's calm lasted only until Sam turned to him. They teared up at the same moment, the room dissolving in a blur of light and color. Matt discarded his crutches and lunged at his dad, a half-step-hobble-collapse that had Karen _tsk_ ing in reproach. Matt's knee throbbed in agreement, but his dad was there, alive, his voice raspy and rough, and Matt could only imagine how dry his throat was, but he wasn't asking for Matt to wait.

Matt ducked his head, sobs wracking his body as he curled into Sam's chest, and he'd have been embarrassed if Sam wasn't crying, too, and trying to pull Matt even closer. He felt like he was thirteen again, creating a spectacle on the Garrison's lawn as his dad emerged from the debrief of his latest mission. Three months, six months, a year--it had always felt so _long_  to Matt, and he'd always been the first to sprint to his dad, always wanted to be picked up like he was as young as Pidge still.

He'd always felt _safe_  in his dad's arms, wrapped up and shielded from the crowd, all the world on surer footing now that his dad was home. It was the same now, though there was no reason for it. Matt wasn't a kid anymore; he didn't need his dad to protect him. If anything, _Sam_  was the one who should have needed comfort and reassurance after everything he'd been through.

But he held Matt, swaying gently, whispering into his hair, and Matt thought that maybe that was what he needed--the normalcy. If he was anything like Matt--and Matt was well aware how much he took after his dad--the last thing he wanted was to be handled like glass.

It took a few minutes for Matt to calm down enough to realize that Karen had wrapped her arms around them both--one part affection, one part concern. The inflexible frame of Matt's crutches pressed into his back beneath Karen's hand. And, yeah, maybe Matt should take the hint, but it was just so _hard_ to hug someone with the crutches in the way.

Pidge had wormed their way into the very center of the tangle of limbs, the way they'd always burrowed under blankets and into already-full couches.

Matt finally pulled back, wiping his eyes. He didn't want to let go, some irrational part of his brain desperate for every second of contact in case Haggar or Keena somehow came back from the dead to sweep Sam away again.

He caught sight of Nyma and Rolo, sitting together on the translucent bed of the cryopod, arms around each other and squeezing until there was no space left at all. Val perched on the edge of the bed a few inches from Nyma the tears flowing freely and her hand resting on Beezer's head.

"Oh!" Matt spun--grasping Shiro's arm as he remembered at the last minute not to put his foot down--and dropped back into his hover chair, his momentum sending him skimming across the room to the bench where he'd left the week's project. Keith, lurking in the shadows by the door, offered him a smile, which Matt returned, sniffling and tearing up all over when he realized that Keith had been crying, too.

Sam followed behind Matt, Karen tucked against his side, Pidge bounding ahead, Shiro clasping his shoulder with a smile. "Oh?" Sam repeated.

Matt pulled the case into his lap and spun around. Rolo and Nyma had pulled apart, and Sam had veered aside, pulling Rolo into a crushing hug.

"Whaddaya know?" Rolo said, his voice muffled by Sam's white medsuit. "We made it home after all."

"I told you we would, son."

Keith gave a start and finally inched forward, lurking at Shiro's shoulder like he needed a shield between him and his own family. (Matt rolled his eyes, but let Keith be skittish--for now. He'd figure out how pointless that was soon enough.)

Karen ran her hand across Sam's shoulders, and he turned to her with a smile. "Karen, I'd like you to meet Rolo. Rolo, my wife Karen. You've already met Pidge and Matt."

"A pleasure," Karen said. She gave Sam a sidelong look. "You know, I get the feeling I should mention that I've become quite familiar with adoption law while you were away."

Rolo waved his hands, the tips of his ears flushing dark. "Oh, no, it's nothing like that."

"Pity," Karen said. "Well. If you ever change your mind..."

Sam, meanwhile, was still staring at Karen, a furrow between his brows. "Since when have you been interested in adoption law, of all things?"

"Since it became relevant."

Her eyes darted to the side, and Sam followed her gaze to Keith, who froze like a startled rabbit, eyes wide and terrified.

Sam glanced back to Karen. "I see."

Matt smiled to himself and slid up to the cryopod bed beside Rolo, plunking his case down and splaying his hands atop it. "Hey."

"Hey," Rolo said. "Good to see you again."

Matt snorted. "Understatement of the century. Nyma hasn't been the same without you."

"Oh, right," Nyma said, her attempt at sarcasm somewhat undermined by the tear tracks on her cheeks. " _I've_  been a mess. Like you were any better."

Rather than answer, Matt reached out and ghosted a finger along the back of Nyma's knee, where he knew she was sensitive. She jolted, then kicked at his hand. "Brat."

"You know you love me."

Pidge folded themself over the far end of the bed, grinning at Rolo. "Nyma may have sort of adopted him. Keith, too."

Rolo gave them a bemused smile. "Adoption's in the air here, huh?"

"Don't listen to a word they say," Nyma said, glaring at Pidge, who stuck their tongue out. "They're a brat, too."

Val dissolved into giggles and turned away to try to hide it.

" _Anyway._ " Matt undid the clasps on the case, then stopped with his hands on the lid and glanced at Rolo. "You need a new leg."

Rolo's hand went to his leg, which ended halfway down the thigh. "You...?"

Matt shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. "I totally get it if you want to customize it or build your own--I can get your a workspace and whatever materials you need--but I needed a project and you shouldn't have to wait, so--"

He opened the case and lifted out the prosthetic--a fairly simple model, sleek and streamlined. Matt had mostly concentrated on getting the movement right so Rolo could be up and mobile from the word go.

"The pod took your measurements, so the socket should fit pretty well already, but we can adjust if we have to."

He trailed off as Rolo stared at him.

"What?"

Rolo shook his head. "Nothing. You're a lot like your old man, you know that?"

Matt glance at his dad, who was beaming and teary-eyed, and he couldn't help but blush at all the attention. He ducked his head and swallowed his tears. There'd been enough of that lately. He'd rather have smiles. He'd rather hear the laughter that was finally starting to become normal again.

"Let's get you into this," he said, settling the prosthetic on the ground beside Rolo's bed. "Zuza and Rax are waiting for you, and they're going to kill us if we take too long."

* * *

Nyma was going to have to get better at acting if she was going to salvage her surly reputation. Her cheeks hurt from smiling so much, and she hadn't even managed to feign irritation when Matt decided to pick on her again over lunch. Keep this up, and people were going to say she'd gone soft.

She just couldn't help it. Rolo was here, boisterous as ever, sweeping Zuza off her feet and then charming little Azra when the introductions were made. Sam fell right in with the parents, and Pidge hardly stopped squawking all day, always remembering something new they wanted to show their dad and scampering off to find it.

Twice now, Val had caught Nyma by surprise, snapping a picture of what Val called her sappy face.

Nyma was going to have to steal her phone before those pictures got out.

The worst, though, was that evening, when the team piled into the rec room for movies and junk food. (They called it junk food, but the Kahales had been unusually fussy about the menu, adamant that they could come up with someone everyone would like that wouldn't upset stomachs that had grown accustomed to the diet of Imperial prisons.)

Nyma had coughed at the wrong moment and been roped into helping shuttle over the truly staggering amount of platters. She wasn’t the only one; Lance had set up shop in the kitchen with Hunk and his family, nominally helping prepare the food but mostly just distracting Hunk. Allura and Meri danced around the room, arranging dishes on trays, adding garnishes that were utterly unnecessary considering no one was likely to even notice they were there, and occasionally darting in to dollop mousse on each other’s noses or steal a kiss when the other wasn’t looking.

It was downright sickening, but Nyma would be lying if they weren’t graceful while they did it. They moved like they had at the grand ball, and even without the flowing gowns and elaborate makeup, they looked like a dream.

Nyma made it a point to stay out of their way.

“How much more _is_ there?” Nyma asked, falling against the counter with a dramatic huff. “My arms are about to fall off.”

Hunk positioned one last triangle of some sort of flatbread atop a display that looked like a flower--and like it had taken an hour to arrange--and flashed an apologetic smile. “Last load, I promise.”

Nyma narrowed her eyes, but his attention was already back on Lance. From the scraps Nyma had picked up on, they’d been talking about whether Hunk was going to move in with Shay after they freed the last of the Balmera.

 _I dunno, maybe,_ was the best answer he could give, and Lance whined until Hunk turned the interrogation back on him.

“Are _you_ going to move in with _Keith?_ ”

Lance leaned his elbows on the counter and dropped his chin into his hands with a wistful sigh. “Someday.”

“Oh my god,” Nyma said, snatching the flatbread and stalking with it over to the trolleys already laden down with drinks and dips. She had to spin to avoid Meri, who had a streak of glitter in her hair and a smear of something red on her cheek and had just stolen a bowl of matching goop from Allura.

Lance straightened, offended. “’Oh my god’ _what?_ ” he demanded. “Excuse me for knowing I’d like to marry the guy someday.”

Meri and Hunk both cooed at that, and Lance flushed crimson. Nyma set her bowl down with a _thunk._ “If you know, then why haven’t you proposed?”

“I’m not going to scare him off Nyma, come on. I know he’s not ready to make a decision like that. Look how long it took him to wrap his head around being a Holt. Now you want to make him hyphenate?”

“Aww, you’re gonna hyphenate?” Hunk asked. “Keith and Lance Mendoza-Holt. Or will it be Holt-Mendoza?”

Lance spluttered. “I don’t know! I can barely pick a spot for our first date.”

“You’ve been dating for more than a year,” Nyma said.

“We were at war.”

“So it doesn’t count?” Nyma kicked to release the brake on her trolley and headed for the door. “You’re hopeless.”

They traveled in a pack to the rec room, Lance still blushing, Hunk still cooing, Meri and Allura hunkered down together over a single trolley and cooking up one scheme or another, Nyma refusing to admit that any of it made her heart swell like those goddamned feel-good movies Val was so fond of.

As they came off the elevator on the rec room’s floor, a stampede of shrieking, shouting tweens threatened to topple the trolleys. Luz, Mateo, Edi, Wyn, and Maka--along with several faces Nyma didn’t know--charged past in bathing suits and towels, piling into an elevator that barely fit the entire pack.

“Have fun!” Lance called over his shoulder. “Make sure you’re back by nine!”

“Thanks _Mom,_ ” Mateo returned, and Lance scowled, but the elevator door closed too fast for him to get off a decent quip.

Meri patted his shoulder, then charged ahead, putting her feet up on the trolley’s lowest shelf and skimming along until the fail-safes installed by someone smarter than any of them here kicked in and slowed her pace to a crawl.

A few minutes later, it was finally done. Five _frickin’_ trolleys of snacks and drinks and whatever else, and a swarm of hungry paladins piling plates high with food. Nyma fled to the couch where she'd left Rolo and found him draped over Val, who had her phone out and angled toward him. They were swiping through pictures Nyma was probably better off ignoring and acting for all the universe like old friends.

Val said something that made Rolo laugh, and Nyma just about keeled over right there.

Val looked up innocently and wiggled her fingers, making room for Nyma between the pair of them. Nyma stalked over and dropped down, sulking to hide how flustered she was. After the way she’d gagged at Lance and Hunk and the Alteans, she’d never live it down.

"I'm too fucking gay for you two, you know that? Fuck off," she added as Val rested her chin on Nyma’s shoulder and fluttered her eyelashes.

Val laughed, and Rolo leaned against her, and Nyma didn't know what the future held for them, but for the first time she could remember, she was _damn_  excited to find out.

* * *

The prison caught up to Sam late that night. It had been a good day--a _good_ day. He'd forgotten it was possible to laugh like that, and he'd finally met Allura properly--a charming woman, as he'd already known she would be. She and Shiro moved like long-time dance partners, each constantly aware of where the other was and what they were doing. They needed only a glance to be understood, and their fondness for one another was evident in every touch, every word.

It was the same everywhere he looked. Pidge and Val whispered and schemed and flitted about; the same energy looped endlessly among Matt and Akira and Keith-- _Keith_ , who was so undeniably part of this family that Sam hardly needed Karen to have spelled it out, who made Matt and Pidge laugh and softened Karen's deeply lined face. Sam hardly knew Keith and already he couldn't help but love him.

And of course there was Matt and Shiro, hopelessly caught in each other's gravity, trading secret smiles across the room, interlocking fingers whenever they were near.

They were getting married, they told him. They wanted Sam to officiate.

It was all so _perfect_ , perfect in a way that made it all feel like a dream. Sam ate his fill and kissed his wife and watched his kids' boisterous presences fill the halls of the castle. He saw Rolo and Rax and Zuza as they were meant to be, and met the families whose memories were treasured secrets, doled out in moments of vulnerability.

And when night came, and Sam parted ways with his children--by blood or by bond--and retreated with his wife to a private room with a bed that seemed an impossible luxury... the fear began to creep in.

None of it felt real enough, yet, to trust it would still be there in the morning. Without the laughter and company to chase away the memories, they began to creep back in, and Sam sat on the edge of the mattress, staring into the shadows, while Karen got ready for bed.

She frowned at him when she emerged, dressed in a pair of silk pajamas that matched the ones laid out for Sam on the armchair nearby. "Everything okay?"

Sam shook himself, forced a smile. "Just trying to wrap my head around all this," he said.

"Me too." She wrapped her arms around herself, then crossed the room and sat beside him. "I tried to stay optimistic, but more often than not, I thought we were going to lose you."

Sam had tried not to admit it, even to himself, but he'd expected to die in that prison, too.

He didn't say so now, though. It was all in the past, and he didn't want to sour today by dwelling in the gloom. But even once he'd roused himself enough to change and brush his teeth--another little luxury, like the shower and shave he'd had earlier in the day--the darkness clung to the corners of his minds. He lay in bed beside Karen and stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. The mattress was too soft, the room too dark and too warm, the air too still with only Karen's breath to break the silence.

For years now, being apart from Rax and Rolo had meant only bad news, and he couldn't beat down the irrational fear that something was happening to them now, wherever they were. He tried to focus on Karen, on the unfathomable blessing it was to have her here, but doing so only made him want to pull her close.

That wouldn't be fair to her. The clinging, depriving her of sleep, or asking her to take on the burden of his fears, when she'd already taken on so much else. He matched his breathing to hers, reveled in the warmth of her body beside him, and tried to let that be enough.

It wasn't. He closed his eyes and found the cell waiting. He heard the irregular beat of guard patrols in the walls, smelled the lab in the recycled air that pushed through the vents every so often with a hum that momentarily drowned out the softer thumps, humms, and sighs of the castle.

Sam pressed his face to his pillow, willfully ignoring the conjured sensations, and chased sleep that was never going to come.

Karen shifted suddenly, and Sam jumped, flinching away as she laid her hand atop his and squeezed. 

"Sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to keep you up."

She shook her head. "I get it. You're not the only one on this castle who needed time to readjust." Sam frowned, but Karen just patted his hand and settled back in. "I've heard the observatory out at the top of Red Tower is a good place to visit when the insomnia hits."

It was neither an invitation nor a dismissal--Karen clearly had no intention of leaving the bed so late at night, but she wasn't asking him to leave, either. Her suggestion was just that, and she gave no sign that she'd be offended whether he took it or not.

Another sixty seconds of staring at the darkness told him staying here wasn't doing anyone any good, so he pushed himself up, pausing only to kiss Karen's cheek. There were slippers by the door, a cardigan in the closet. ( _His_  cardigan. He was halfway out the door before he realized, and it stopped him in his tracks. The musty smell was nothing special; the left sleeve was fraying and the garment hung off him like it was meant for someone else, but he _remembered_ this.)

"I thought you said you weren't expecting me to make it home," he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

Karen remained as she was, curled on her side and facing the wall. "I also said I tried to be optimistic."

Sam looked down at himself, pulled his cardigan around him, and headed out into the hall. 

It was strange to wander the halls alone, much less at night, the hush of sleep all around him. Stranger still to realize that he knew his way around the druids' lab far better than around the Castle of Lions. Pidge had showed him how to use screens mounted regularly along the walls to navigate, though, and he reminded himself that he was among friends, and that the worst he had to fear if he were caught out and about was pity.

Voices behind a nearby door slowed his pace--all the more so because he was pretty sure that was the room Zuza had been given. Sam understood she'd had to get Lance to convince her sister to sleep in her own room next door, though no one had said whether Zuza was having nightmares or only feared them.

Sam waited until he was certain it was Zuza's voice he heard--and Rax's responding in equally low tones--before he knocked. Both voices cut off, and a moment later the door opened, Rax's tall frame blocking the light within.

"Sam," he said, both surprised and relieved.

Sam's smile was sad, because he knew what that meant. "Couldn't sleep?"

"Not yet." Rax's eyes darted aside, and he stepped back to allow Sam into the room. Zuza sat huddled on the bed, wrapped in a heavy comforter, her chin atop her knees. "You're welcome to join us."

Sam refrained from asking questions, but Zuza and Rax both must have sensed them anyway. Zuza's hand poked out from the folds of the blanket to scratch her cheek.

"It's hard to stay grounded," she murmured. "Especially at night. Rax has been helping."

"You say that like it is charity," he said, scowling. He squared his shoulders and met Sam's eyes, bristling and defensive and suddenly bitter. "I have been trying to get away from my family."

Sam raised an eyebrow, but waited out his surprise before he spoke. "They're smothering you?"

"I might feel better if they were." Rax shook his head. "It is their song. It... is louder than I remember. I can hardly sleep when they are a room away. Returning home may kill me outright."

He spoke with no small amount of melodrama, and scowled harder, as though to scold himself for his suffering.

Sam laid a hand on his back and glanced over at Zuza, who looked so small and ashamed it made Sam's heart ache. "I've heard good things about this observatory out in Red Tower. You want to come check it out with me?"

Zuza nodded, and Rax hovered close to her as the three of them headed out into the hall. Sam debated knocking on Rolo's door, but didn't want to wake him if he'd had better luck sleeping than the rest of them.

A moot point, as it turned out. Rolo was waiting for them by the elevator, not yet even changed into pajamas, a worn beanie pulled low over his ears and his eyes fixed on the floor.

"I heard," Rolo said as Sam opened his mouth. "I know I don't need to keep watch here, but I couldn't help it. I don't feel safe if I can't see where everyone is." He looked up. "Figured this observatory of yours might be a better view."

"The company certainly can't hurt," Sam said, putting an arm around Rolo's shoulders as they piled into the elevator. The panel inside gave them directions to the observatory, and Sam selected the appropriate floor. They kept quiet as they headed out to Red Tower, four skittish ghosts huddled together against whoever might be watching them.

The observatory was easy enough to find; it took up nearly the entire top floor of the tower, the domed ceiling fully translucent to afford an unparalleled view of the stars.

Sam couldn't give the view the attention it deserved, however. His eyes were drawn instead to the pair lying together in the center of the floor.

Matt tilted his head back first, then nudged Shiro, who sat up and turned, sympathy pulling at his eyes. He patted the floor beside them without a word. Rax, Rolo, and Zuza hesitated, but only until Sam stepped forward, accepting Shiro's offer of comfort. They all settled in there on the ground together, Rax bristling in defense of Zuza, Rolo sticking to Sam's side like he expected a trap.

"We can talk if you want to," Matt said, still staring at the stars. "But there's no pressure."

"What is there to talk about?" Rax asked.

"The nightmares," Matt returned, not missing a beat. "The way you close your eyes sometimes and you're back there, and you wonder if you just dreamed that you escaped. The way panic sneaks up on you and even though you _know_  you're safe, you can't get yourself to believe it."

Shiro laid a hand on Matt's arm, and he fell silent, but Rax had deflated, his silence somewhat abashed.

"I forgot you've been through this, too," Rolo said. "You both always seemed so..."

"We all had our own hells," Shiro said when it became clear Rolo wasn’t going to finish the thought. "The Arena wasn't the same as a lab, and Vel-17 was different from Vindication. But I hope you know that when we say we understand, that's not just a platitude."

"Does it ever get better?" Zuza asked.

"Absolutely." Matt blew out a long breath, humming softly. "I don't know if what they did to us will ever go away completely, but it does get smaller."

The silence that followed this statement was poised on the edge of something. Sam thought the others each, almost, wanted to talk about it. Sam certainly did. But he didn't think he was ready yet, not entirely. The horrors of that lab were too fresh in his mind, kept down by a flimsy tarp of denial and aggressive optimism. He wasn't ready to rip that away just yet.

Neither Shiro nor Matt pressed. They'd said there was no pressure to talk, and they honored that promise. Slowly, the silence eased into something more companionable. Rolo leaned his head on Sam's arm. Rax and Zuza shifted closer. It was still warmer than their cell had been, and a full stomach and the absence of pain made Sam start to drowse. He couldn't tell if that was a good thing.

The view was nice, though, countless stars splashed across an endless black with colors dancing in between. Sam hadn't seen a view like this since the _Persephone_.

With Matt and Shiro close beside him, he could almost pretend none of it had ever happened. Except that Rolo and Rax and Zuza were here, too, and Sam wouldn't trade them for anything, even the chance to erase everything he'd suffered.

It loomed large in the back of his mind, just waiting for him to drop his guard, but Matt had promised it would get smaller.

Sam trusted him.

And eventually, he even managed to sleep.

* * *

A week later, the Castle of Lions returned to Earth. Shiro couldn't help feeling it was too soon.

"You _promise_  you'll call if anything comes up," Lance said, scowling. Shiro wondered if he realized he was stretching his neck to give him just that much extra height over Allura, who was making a valiant effort not to smile.

"It won't," she said, and then, because Lance wasn't the only one who looked ready to mutiny, she added, "but I will."

Lance nodded, his eyes drifting to Meri. Rosa had offered her a place to stay, as Carmen and Marco had offered one to Nyma and Rolo. (Nyma had accepted on both their behalves, though Shiro suspected that was only because Val had fed Nyma a line about Rolo being tempted to run into the line of fire before he was fully recovered.)

Meri, on the other hand, had declined.

"Don't go getting all mopey on me, kiddo," she said, tweaking Lance's nose. "You'll see me in, like, two months."

"I'd _better._ " He sighed, shoulders slumping. "I'm gonna miss you."

Meri's lip wavered, and she pulled him into a hug. "Damn it, Lance. I'm gonna miss you, too."

Shiro glanced at Allura, who smiled at him, and darted her eyes toward Akira. Akira put on a good show of roughhousing with Keith--using the activity mostly as a way to tease Matt--but Shiro had seen him staring at Meri earlier. They were all going to miss each other. It wasn't as though they'd never been apart over the course of the last two years, but time flowed differently when you were on the front lines of a war.

Case in point: Pidge, who had thrown themself with vigor into Keith and Akira's wrestling match. Shiro swore it was only yesterday they were fourteen years old, four feet and change and so young it made their armor look out of place.

They were seventeen now, maybe even taller than Matt, and Shiro had _no clue_  when that had happened.

He'd missed a lot, saving the universe. He still hadn't decided what he was going to do with his life, but for now, he was glad to be taking a break. It would be strange to be away from Allura, away from Meri and Coran and Hunk and Shay and the Black Lion most of all. But they had the comms, and they had wormholes, and it took a bare glance around the bridge to see that not a single one of them could let something as simple as distance wear away at the bonds they'd forged out here in the black.

A sudden hush fell over the team as Earth came into view in the distance. It loomed before them, growing larger with every passing moment, all brilliant hues and glittering metal. The scars of a long-ago battle had all but faded, visible to Shiro only because he knew where to look: flecks of darkness that were out of place among city lights, glimmering blue domes over Carlsbad and D.C. The massive planetary rings burned golden at the horizon with the coming dawn, so grand and so sleek they seemed out of place next to a throng of archaic satellites and the blip of the ISS. It was as though someone had dipped into Shiro's memories of home, and into Allura's, and made some strange chimera.

In many ways, Earth was as changed by the war as the paladins themselves: scarred, hardened. It was almost unrecognizable compared to the world he'd left behind.

But it had survived.

The castle-ship rounded the moon, and the sun dawned on the new Earth, a tide of light and life chasing away the darkness.

And there beyond the darkness, beyond the breaking and the mending, there at the dawning of a new day--there was a new beginning. For the universe, for Earth, and for them all.


End file.
